by Laura Gill
Rusa thanked her, shut his mouth, and scurried on to his next task. Anepadu and Ensham, overseen by Kleonikos and the Minos’s official, were already sorting through household idols and furniture. The work proceeded at a steady pace until Rusa recognized among the items a familiar inlaid table. He checked to be certain, then informed the official, “This belongs to my father.”
Sirapuros, the official, looked up from where he had been hovering over Ensham’s shoulder. “Can you verify your claim?”
“If your salvage crew can access the storeroom of the house they recovered the table from, they’ll find a tablet documenting the sale,” Rusa said.
“I’m afraid the only tablets they’ve been instructed to collect are from Minos Hammuras’s old residence. In the meantime, we can’t release items based simply on the claimant’s word.”
Sirapuros’s condescending tone set Rusa’s teeth on edge. “Are you questioning my honesty?”
The man’s eyes widened, and he hesitated. “Well, no, but there has to be some documentation, and we have no instructions for releasing property without verification. I’m afraid you’ll have to submit a formal claim and then wait for someone to assess—”
“And what of those others who lost property—not expensive furniture, jewelry, or vessels—but simple things?” Typical bureaucratic incompetence. Either no one had remembered to make provision for claims, or the Minos did not intend to release salvaged property at all. “What is the procedure for them? Are they expected to produce tablets for a cook pot they bartered for in the marketplace, or a blanket the mistress of the house spent six months weaving?”
Sirapuros crossed his arms. “You will have to submit a formal claim,” he repeated, “and wait for a ruling.”
“To whom shall I submit this claim?” Rusa countered. “Which official is handling property claims?” No one, he suspected. Meanwhile, Anepadu and Ensham had stopped working and gawked at him in astonishment. Kleonikos, stationed behind Sirapuros’s chair where he could observe the scribes, was growing restive.
There was no answer. Rusa switched tactics. “Well, since your crews are salvaging tablets from Minos Hammuras’s house, that means they’re searching the archive. Should they discover a cedar box containing writing materials, it belongs to me. No, I have no documentation, but my name is inscribed on the box itself. I accidentally left it behind when helping the late Master Scribe Ankeros from the house after the earthquake.”
That evening, two men knocked on Kikkeros’s door. They delivered the table, along with a familiar but battered cedar box containing Rusa’s writing materials. Kleonikos, accompanying them, soured the moment with the message he had been given to recite. “Next time, do not make a scene, but submit a formal request for your property to Master Scribe Ramush.” His voice was without inflection, his expression neutral.
Rusa was fairly certain that had he appealed to the Minos’s self-important scribe, he never would have seen his property again.
He had other concerns by then, however, and quickly forgot the incident and his unsettling, growing suspicion that Pyramesos was trying to conceal some aspect of Minos Hammuras’s death. For earlier, Kikkeros had welcomed him home with news that added a troubling new dimension to his commission in Katsamba.
“The Minos’s messenger returned this morning with the news. Now it’s everywhere.” The lines graven across Kikkeros’s forehead deepened. “You haven’t heard?”
“Heard what?” Information did not circulate at either the graveside or in the counting tent.
“Katsamba has been destroyed by earthquake and flood, and the scorching wind.” Kikkeros leaned across the table to refresh the wine in Rusa’s cup. “Gods help you, you will find nothing but the dead.”
Rusa forgot about his drink. What did that mean for Amanas and his family, for Aridmos, and for all the other acquaintances and contacts he had in Katsamba? The overwhelming prospect of collecting, cataloguing, and burying thousands more rendered him speechless. In just four days, he had tallied and buried 3,190 corpses—roughly a third of Knossos’s population. Close to six thousand people dwelled in Katsamba. If they were all dead... Surely there must have been survivors, for otherwise... Rusa preferred not to acknowledge the alternative, for if the worst had come to pass, he could be away for several weeks. His father did not have that much longer to live.
Kikkeros looked sympathetic. “The gods have granted you one blessing, Rusa. An informant from inside the Minos’s court has told me that Naptu will be vetted and made available.”
That was, indeed, a blessing, however small it seemed. Rusa nodded his acknowledgment. “I asked the priestess of Hekate to send word to Didanam about Father. I probably won’t have time to go looking for him before I go, but can you have someone tell Balinaru? I’m not even sure if he’s all right. It’s important, though. I want to be there when...when...” He found he could not articulate what he knew to be inevitable. “I want to, truly, but I...” Rusa spread his hands upon the table, noticing then how much they were trembling.
*~*~*~*
Two days later, a solemn procession consisting of twenty-two laborers, a Hellene bodyguard, four scribes, a priestess of Hekate, and a cart drawn by a skittish, half-dead mule departed Knossos, heading north toward Katsamba. No one expected them back for several days.
Signs of inundation were everywhere, the damage looking worse the farther north the party traveled. Whereas in Knossos the river had spilled its banks, flooding mansions and streets, the floodwaters had destroyed entire fields and groves along the route to Katsamba. Building debris lay in the middle of vineyards, and where structures had once stood, the foundations had been mysteriously scoured bare.
With his spear, Kleonikos prodded the gravel covering the ground. “Sea urchin.” Impaling a specimen, he held it up for closer scrutiny, then glanced over his left shoulder to gauge the distance between the river and where he stood. “Something is very odd here,” he muttered.
The sight of him rummaging through the gravel in his Hellene war gear was so incongruous that it would have been comical had the situation not been so dire. “I have never seen a flood like this.” The long scarlet horsetail dangling from his boar tusk helmet moved when he shook his head, and the tall shield slung over his back thumped the tendons of his ankles as he walked. Rusa did not know what enemy he expected to encounter amid such desolation.
Among the human dead, animal corpses also littered the debris field. Rusa had not considered what had become of any livestock that might have perished at Knossos. Since the temple owned most of the surrounding farms, their own scribes must be taking those tallies. Rusa assigned that task to Ensham and Anepadu, while he and Naptu busied themselves recording the human losses.
The laborers deepened an existing ditch and started collecting corpses. Rusa bound a cloth over his mouth and nose, but not even the narcissus-scented wax nodules the priestess advised him to shove up his nose could keep the stench at bay. He imagined the miasma of decomposition wafting through his garments, attaching itself to the woolen fibers like octopi suckers, and his entire being recoiled.
Worse, he felt increasingly helpless and hopeless. There were no survivors, no one to assist, no one to tell him what had happened. All he and his party could do was count the numbers of dead and ensure they had a decent burial. Recording whether they were male or female, or young or old was in most cases impossible, as many had been battered beyond recognition and left to the elements for days.
That evening, camped in the middle of a ruined orchard, around a pathetic fire of whatever kindling they had been able to gather, the party offered libations to Velchanos and Poteidan to grant them passage through the fields of destruction, and to Hekate to guard them from evil spirits. Afterward, the tone of conversation remained grim, and inevitably turned toward Katsamba.
“How many dead do you think we’ll find?” Anepadu asked. “The rumors speak of hundreds, maybe thousands.”
“You shouldn’t believe everyth
ing you hear.” Kleonikos spoke with a nonchalance nobody else shared.
To Rusa’s surprise, Naptu decided to challenge him. “Why not? Today there were thirty-three dead. Katsamba has a population of six thousand. Have we found a single survivor?” Kleonikos started to interrupt, but Naptu, who was clearly not finished speaking, stood his ground. “Go ahead, Hellene, tell me I know nothing, but what have we found to suggest we will find anyone alive in Katsamba?”
There was muttered agreement from the laborers, who kept to themselves out of deference to their betters.
“Because your life is small and narrow, scribe, and nothing but numbers.” Kleonikos leaned forward with a precarious gleam in his eyes. “I’ve been around and seen things that would make your skin crawl. I’ve seen animals born with two heads, and god-fearing people eaten alive by plague. I’ve seen green fire at sea, beasts with odd humps on their backs, and men with slanted eyes and gold skin, but I never saw the gods annihilate an entire town down to the last child.” The more he spoke, the more apparent his Hellene accent became. “The gods destroy enough to make their point. Only men butcher and raze everything, and that’s because they become animals when the demons of war afflict them.”
Naptu remained unconvinced. “The gods have long been acting in ways that no one’s ever seen. Thunder without lightning, scorching clouds of ash, rocks that float in water and choke the sea lanes, blasts of air that knock men down—you cannot ignore the evidence, Kleonikos.”
Ensham groaned, “We’re walking into the underworld.” He covered his face with his hands.
“Look what you’ve done, Scribe. The youth has no stomach for your dark words,” Kleonikos grumbled. “Better you close your mouth.”
A woman’s husky voice interjected, “If we were entering the dark goddess’s realm, I would surely tell you.”
Rusa could not bear to contribute to the discussion when thoughts of his father preoccupied him. He sat hunched over, raking his fingers through his hair. Night in that wasteland conjured shades. He had said his formal goodbyes to Yikashata that morning, although it seemed to him that he had been saying farewell ever since the day of the burning wind.
“How do you stand the constant presence of death?” he asked the priestess, who was sitting next to him.
Whereas her goddess-mask exuded a sinister eeriness, the priestess as a woman was refreshingly down-to-earth. Her name was Nindani, and she was more than amenable about sharing her sacred calling insofar as its strictures allowed. “There is nothing unnatural about death,” she explained, “because death is part of the natural cycle. It becomes dark and frightening because it’s unknown. We dislike the darkness because we are creatures of light. We prefer summer’s brightness to winter’s cold, youth to old age, sweets to bitter herbs, but those things all have their place.”
It sounded so philosophical, so tidy, and rational, but nothing at all like the reality he knew. “You really believe that,” he countered, “even after the suffering and horrors you’ve seen?”
“This is a test of our faith, Dadarusa.” He heard a smile behind her voice. Only a priestess of Hekate would find in the topic something to smile about, he reflected. “These physical manifestations of dying will frighten anyone. Yes, dying. What we are seeing are people frozen at the moment when their spirits were ripped from their flesh. Dying can be sudden, painful, terrifying, the start of a journey where the destination is unknown, and from which no traveler has ever returned. But do not confuse dying with death. Death is like a welcome embrace. Death released these souls from their torment.” Nindani made a contemplative sound. “You would not understand that, groomed as you are to recoil from darkness. Those of us who spend time with the dark goddess, we know things beyond your comprehension.”
Try as he might, Rusa could not view it her way. There was nothing kind or welcome about his father’s impending death. But for an accident of fate, Yikashata never would have been burned or hurled to the ground. “And if we find hundreds or thousands of dead in Katsamba, will you still believe that?”
Nindani pushed back her hood to let the firelight play across her face. She was not attractive, but she owned a particular air of self-possession and forcefulness that immediately drew one’s attention. Rusa was not surprised—in his estimation a priestess who served as a vessel for a goddess had to possess a certain inner strength—but the laborers, awed by her presence, were falling over themselves trying to offer whatever small luxuries they could devise. To her credit, she refused to ride in the cart, or accept a larger or better portion of anything anyone else received.
“You say that as though I have no pity,” she remarked. “Of course I feel pity, and sorrow. I am only mortal. But the dark goddess who dwells inside me, she understands mysteries of life and death and rebirth that you do not. She knows that we all come to her, sooner or later.” She paused to let him reflect on that statement. It still sounded too philosophical, too divorced from the harshness of the world around them. “Whether in their hundreds or thousands, whatever dead we find will be beyond all suffering. What they need from us is simply a proper burial and offerings so they can find their way to the goddess’s domain.”
It was not the sort of conversation Rusa liked having in the dark just before going to sleep, and it did not provide the reassurance or the answers he had sought when posing his original question.
Rusa heard a distant owl hooting—a messenger from the dread goddess. He shivered when he went to lie down. Dusani had packed a quilted pad to ease his nights on the hard ground, but he was too accustomed to soft living, and the tender skin under his bandages amplified every bump and stone.
Naptu bedded down beside him for warmth and companionship, for it was an unseasonably cold night, one filled with apprehension. “You’ve been pensive all evening, Dadarusa.” He touched the back of his hand to Rusa’s forehead. “Are you feeling all right? Dusani does not want you to strain yourself.”
“I have no choice.”
“What instructions did she give regarding your bandages?”
Rusa alternately took comfort in his old tutor’s concern, while wishing Naptu would leave him alone. “To change them regularly, and to keep the wounds clean and dry.” Somewhere in his baggage were rolls of makeshift bandages torn from his wife’s smocks. “There isn’t much about the outdoors that’s clean or dry, though.” And who was going to change his dressings? Rusa could not bear to look at the blisters, much less touch them, felt certain he would bungle the task, and considered it rude to ask Nindani as the only woman among them to perform such an intimate service. “I will be fine.”
“No matter what the Minos orders, you should not press yourself too hard on this assignment,” Naptu advised. Rusa started to refuse on the grounds that he was not a weakling, when the older scribe added, “Please, don’t argue, Dadarusa. I have seen many burn victims afflicted with chills, including your father. The fire demon responsible for their wounds stole their heat away, or so I heard a priest of Payawon claim yesterday.”
“I’m fine,” Rusa reiterated, more firmly this time. “The night’s cold, that’s all.” Once under the fleeces, he reasoned, he should feel better. Not that he would have minded a small draught of the poppy.
He woke before dawn, stiff and chilled, and haunted by the unsettling taste of his disjointed dreams, in which he had half-walked, half-floated through an orchard with an unknown weight on his back. A black-robed, owl-faced goddess spouting Nindani’s strange philosophy had met him at the entrance to a sacred cave. As she sat on a altar stone debating with him the nature of death, the fineness of spun wool, and the grapes that made the most excellent wines, dying souls drifted down like snow flurries. Miniscule and numerous, they whitened the darkness in their thousands, dusting the goddess’s black robes. Rusa heard tiny little shrieks when the goddess brushed them from her lap and palms into the eternal night. He could not unravel all the threads of the dream well enough to affix a meaning beyond a bone-deep certainty that he had
received an omen.
Rusa wrapped himself in the mantle Dusani had packed for him and hobbled along beside the cart to exercise away his stiffness. If they discovered no further corpses along the route that morning, the party could reach the outskirts of Katsamba by afternoon. Rusa recognized a hill in the distance. Beyond that were groves and vineyards, and then a second, lower hill with houses from which one could see the entirety of the town and the harbor of Katsamba beyond.
The two youngest laborers set out ahead of the slow-moving party to scout the countryside ahead. Before long, they raced back with news no one wanted to hear. “Bodies, dozens of them, on that hill.” The man gestured to the high hill growing in the distance. Everyone then noticed the scavenger birds circling. Hekate’s messengers heralded more desolation.
Rusa briefly considered leaving the dead to the carrion birds by avoiding the hill altogether. Burying dozens of corpses meant another delay, whereas by ignoring them, pretending they did not exist, perhaps the problem would go away on its own. He knew everyone else shared his sentiments, and the temptation. Even Nindani, for all her sophistry about death being a good and natural thing, betrayed a flicker of hesitation.
Yet it was not her decision to make, or his. Kleonikos as the Minos’s representative announced that they would be hiking to the top of the hill to assess the situation. “Larna,” he called over his shoulder to the overseer of the laborers, “take your men and start preparing graves.”
After a steep climb which burned Rusa’s calves and left a stitch in his side, he, the priestess, and the other scribes found themselves faced with a macabre death scene of men, women, and children laid out where they had fallen. Kleonikos and Naptu, brandishing his walking stick, drove away the carrion birds, but where the chaos of night-black wings and shrieks and the sounds of tearing flesh had filled the air, the eerie silence which followed exposed the pathetic tale chronicling the last moments of the dead. Rusa deciphered the realization of terror in which the victims had seen the burning cloud approaching. Some clutched each other, while others had tried in vain to outrun the anger of Velchanos. The hill itself had not been inundated, preserving the scene.