by John Shirley
Edelsheim summoned Hauptmann Gerhard Fangohr and barked an extensive set of instructions. Fangohr grasped Longcroft by his shoulder and escorted him toward the door. “And, Longcroft? You have two days. A boring machine is due to arrive and, when it does, I will make my own door into this mountain.”
8
Hauptmann Gerhard Fangohr conducted Lieutenant Colonel Nathan Longcroft through the maze of circular tents nestled atop the bluff overlooking the valley. Darkness in the Taurus Mountains brought colder temperatures, despair and new terrors. Once again, the moribund prisoners whimpered and wailed, and the night absorbed a doleful expression of grief in a varied chorus of heartbreaking lamentation.
They finally arrived at a cage housing the only surviving creature. Longcroft surmised that the second individual had been subjected to torture the previous evening. The Germans had likely brutalized it maliciously until death mercifully claimed it. The survivor cowered in a far corner of the enclosure; its abnormally long and scrawny arms concealed much of its face, though its luminous, sunken eyes remained visible.
Longcroft noticed immediately that the cage had been left unguarded. He did not know whether the Germans assigned to the task had deserted their post, or if Oberstleutnant Waldemar von Edelsheim was so lacking in experience as an officer that he would fail to allocate manpower to watch over his valuable prisoner. Either way, the lack of security emboldened him: He knew he had to act quickly, and he saw no better opportunity on the horizon.
Longcroft waited patiently as Fangohr unlocked the cage. The moment the door swung open, he attacked with a fury that instantly overwhelmed the larger man, pitching his full weight into the German’s side and stabbing madly at his jugular. An instant later, Longcroft found himself straddling the Hun, blood surging from the spot in his neck. A few inches of Edelsheim’s pen jutted out of the gushing wound.
Longcroft signaled the creature, urging him to escape. The thing needed no further prompting. It jumped to its feet and shambled across the cage, speeding through the door as it picked up momentum. It brushed past Longcroft at breakneck speed, leaving him struggling to regain his footing.
Longcroft followed, racing into the hostile wilderness of the Taurus Mountains. He hoped the creature would be appreciative of his efforts and would lead him to safety. He wanted to retrieve his friends—he wanted to liberate the entire labor camp. He knew neither scenario would be successful. For the moment, he did not even know if he would survive the night. Right now, he did not even know if the creature intended to repay his kindness.
For an hour, he pursued the creature as it scampered along narrow trails carved into the face of the mountain—paths not appropriate for human passage. But each time Longcroft believed he had lost sight of the beast, it reappeared, waiting patiently for its rescuer. By dawn, Longcroft was convinced it was leading him to some route that would take him back to civilization—or to some cave that would lead to a very different destination.
The sun had reached its zenith when Longcroft felt the creature’s knotty digits clamp down on his left arm. He did not dare fight against it as it dragged him down into a dark grotto. Deep inside the cave, a virescent radiance glimmered off lustrous, polished stone. Intricate geometric designs covered the walls, teeming with anomalous lines, aberrant inclines, and shockingly slanted perspectives. The patterns and structures portrayed had parallels both in textbooks on higher mathematics and in forbidden medieval grimoires. Longcroft found himself losing consciousness of time and place while maintaining a fixed discernment and rapt mindset.
Gradually, a sense of disequilibrium overtook Longcroft. He felt momentary lightheadedness and a rush of giddiness. He felt the creature tugging on his shirt, and he shuffled his feet across the floor of the cave though he knew his mind had issued no such command. As they approached one of the renderings, its pattern gradually realigned his faculties, revealing a hidden aperture in the wall of the cave—an opening little more than a crevice.
As they slipped into the twilit realm beyond, Longcroft saw only an indigo blur crowded with formless things. A rush of blackness soon overwhelmed him.
When Longcroft regained his bearings, the creature led him along a cobblestone path through a bizarre jungle populated by towering trees with thick, purple trunks. Countless ebon vines dangled from the distant crimson canopy far overhead, and faceless winged beings perched on small outcroppings of rock along the steep cliffs that encircled the forest. Dwellings had been cut into the face of the stone, too—an ancient city hidden inside the mountain, inhabited by some offshoot of Homo sapiens.
The creature directed Longcroft to the center jungle and to the base of a freestanding stone. A series of steps spiraled toward the pinnacle. He looked down at the hairless, gaunt entity and, for the first time, saw a delicacy and splendor in its form. It tapped its chest gently and pointed to the dwellings on the cliff. Next, it patted Longcroft’s chest and pointed toward the top of the escarpment.
Home.
The word seemed to form in Longcroft’s mind. He nodded and began his ascent.
Scaling the lofty stone might have taken minutes or it might have taken weeks—for Longcroft, time had ceased to exist. He felt no pangs of hunger and not a single muscle complained as he climbed step after step, his gaze ever fixed on the stone path he traversed. Not once did he look down to see how far from the floor his journey had taken him. Not once did he stare up toward the distant peak.
He did not even notice when a rumbling swept through the mountain at the very moment when some trifling machine of human construct began to burrow into the rock. That final nuisance caused a swift and unforgiving response as the tentacle-like vines stretched across time and space and emerged from narrow fissures, scouring the landscape for each and every human on the mountain. Germans, British and Indians found themselves picked off one by one as slender, sinewy, black, whip-like appendages coiled about them and drew them down into subterranean darkness. Their screams echoed through the enclosed jungle, but Longcroft paid no attention.
Finally he found himself standing atop a glassy plateau at the summit of that forbidding crag rising far above a dense forest.
Slowly, Longcroft lifted his eyes and let them rest upon the excruciating panorama. From the crest he could see endless fields of corpses, buckled towers, deteriorated monuments, disintegrated cities, vanquished civilizations, fragmented empires, charred worlds, extinct races, dead stars and lifeless galaxies. Even the horrid cosmic entities who seemed to benefit from this eternal feast of death suffered casualties, as the bloated carcass of more than one self-proclaimed god rotted amongst the boundless transdimensional graveyard.
Longcroft trembled as his sanity faded. As he sank to his knees, he thought only of his walled garden in Madras and his beloved Clarissa.
9
I have never been able to explain adequately how I managed to find my way back to Madras. My daughter, Clarissa, age 7, found me in the garden one morning. When questioned by the authorities, I was at a loss to account for my miraculous return from the Ottoman Empire. Most of my superiors eventually settled upon a heroic narrative that detailed my escape from the Hun at Akdurak and a lengthy cross-country trek in which I outsmarted the Turks and their allies as I made my way across Asia.
Somewhere along the journey, they conclude, I suffered a form of traumatic amnesia.
Many years have passed, and as I write this memoir I discern the portents of war once more. It is an interminable cycle from which there is no escape—and yet it is utterly purposeless, as is our very existence.
I still spend a great deal of time in my garden. No one else has noticed the cryptic pattern inscribed upon the wall near the very spot where Clarissa discovered me all those years ago.
Nathan Longcroft, Interned by the Turks
THE ITHILIAD
BY CHRISTINE MORGAN
1
The Priestess
“Father Dagon, hear my prayer. Hear and help your faithful daughters, taken from
our homes. We have seen our kinsmen slaughtered and our cities sacked by these Achaeans, these men of Greece. We are apportioned out to them in the dividing of the spoils, Chryseis and I. Now, through us, O Dagon, punish them for their offenses. Weaken their alliances. Sow dissension amid their noble ranks.”
Briseis, kneeling, dipped her cupped hands into a basin and lifted them, brimming with sea-water. It trickled through her fingers, not yet webbed by more than the finest silvery film, and ran down her slender arms.
“Breathe down upon their camp a plague-miasma,” she said. “Let them fall sick and ill. Let them suffer and despair. With oracles and omens, show them that they have offended you, god of the deep trenches.”
She closed her wide eyes and poured the sea-water over her upturned face. It wetted the length of her bronze-hued hair, lending a greenish cast. It flowed the lines and hollows of her throat, past small and delicate shell-like ears, past the faint white folds where gills would one day be, along the glistening fish-scale iridescence that traced the nape of her neck and supple spine.
“Show them that it is with Agamemnon, kingly leader of these armies, where their greatest grievance lies. He claims fair-cheeked Chryseis for his own. He has known her touch, O Dagon. He has known the salt-nectar of her palm, and lips, and all those moist and tender places that men do so covet.”
The sea-water, far more than her cupped hands should have held, continued spilling from them. It coursed along the naked curves of her lush and youthful body as she knelt there, lit by lamplight in the well-appointed shelter. As the water reached the mat of woven kelp-grass, it became absorbed and spread no further.
“He has refused the offered ransom,” Briseis went on. “Greatly he desires her, to have and keep her in his house and bed. He would not be parted from her, or return her to her family. That which is his, he will not willingly give up, and despite all that he has, his greed for gain is strong. Strong too is his pride, this son of Atreus, stronger even than that of Menelaus his brother, on whose behalf these ships were gathered and this war begun.”
From beyond the shelter’s walls came the evening-sounds of camp, the meals being made, the watches being set. Her time for prayer and privacy had, she knew, almost come to an end. She opened her hands so that the sea-water rained from them.
“Send sickness to them, Father Dagon, until all other kings of the Achaeans agree that mighty Agamemnon must bend. He has already risked defying the gods of Olympus, who would not send him wind to sail until he made sacrifice even of his own child. Let him now make sacrifice also to you, lord of the deep and far vastness. Let Chryseis be released from him, so that, in his anger and shame he demands just compensation.”
Briseis smiled, revealing tiny teeth like smooth white pearls. Then she rose from the mat of kelp-grass, drew on her chiton and girdle and sandals, and made ready for the return of the man whose shelter this was, famed Achilles, to whom she had been given.
So it would be, her plea granted, and so it soon was. For nine days, death and misery beset the Greek armies, and the corpse-fires burned. On the tenth day, an assembly of the leaders was called. To die in battle, beneath the swords and spears of their enemies, these men expected, and promised to deliver the same. To die like this, like sick dogs, plague-struck and wretched, was far from the glory of war.
As she had expected, Achilles returned from that assembly in a black and furious mood. He and Agamemnon had exchanged many words of contention. In the end, Agamemnon agreed to return Chryseis of the fair cheeks, but he would, he said, have Briseis instead.
“When I,” Achilles told her in aggrieved wroth, “fight as hard, if not harder, than any other man! Yet they would take from me my reward? I am come here as favor to them; the warriors of Ithilium, however strange their blood, are not my sworn foes. They have done me no wrong. Against venerable Priam, tamer of shoggoths, I hold no animosity. It is for the sake of Menelaus, whose wife was led astray, that I am here. See how he and his brother thank me!”
Briseis went to him, Achilles, Peleus’ son, lord of the Myrmidons. She took his face, strong-jawed and handsome, in her hands, cradling it. Her eyes, so wide and round, gazed into his. From the soft, tender flesh of her palms was the salt-nectar secreted. It passed into his skin, more intoxicating than wine, more pervasive than the fruit of the lotus. With a groan, he pulled her to him and kissed her, drinking deeply of its briny sweetness from the font of her lips.
“I would have slain him on the spot,” said Achilles when the kiss ended, “but Athena in her terrible wisdom held me back. That I must give you up, my dearest Briseis, leaves me stricken! And to that man-shaped dog, Agamemnon, who sends his people to die while he stays safely far from the ambuscade? He will regret this insult … all of them shall … for I am done with fighting freely on their behalf!”
“Yes,” Briseis said, as she caressed him. “How thankless they are, how they mistreat you!”
“What chance do they have against the great walls of Troy without me? Who else would stand against Hector, slaughterer of men and Ithilium’s defender? Agamemnon himself? Bah! I think not! They need me!”
“They may need, but they do not deserve,” she said. “Let them be sorry; let them eat out their own hearts, that they did no honor to the best of the Achaeans.”
“I will sit by my ships,” Achilles declared, “and stay well away from all battle, until proud Agamemnon sees the error of his ways.”
This he vowed, and this he soon did. Chryseis was sent home, with sufficient sacrifice made that the plague was swept from the camp. But Agamemnon also did as he had vowed, dispatching his most loyal heralds to fetch Briseis to him from the shelter of Achilles. They went unwilling, in much fear of his anger. He told them that they had no blame in his sight, obedient servants to their king as they were.
Then Achilles bade his own most-trusted friend, Patroclus, to bring the girl forth to be taken away. Patroclus alone was not unhappy to see Briseis go; he had been the closest of companions to Achilles before then, and from jealousy despised her.
Away she went, looking back to see Achilles sitting by his ships as he had said. Without him, all the armies of the Achaeans amounted to little, she knew, and most were already dispirited by the bitterness between the two powerful men.
That night, in the grand pavilion of Agamemnon, Briseis curled herself around the king as he slept. As he’d known the touch of Chryseis, and the sweet salt-nectar secreted, now too did he know hers, and it had its effect.
She pressed her mouth close to his ear. Hair-fine tendrils, like wavering sea-fronds, slid from beneath her tongue to whisper into his mind.
To attack, these whispers urged … attack high-walled Ithilium with full force and fury, strike the Trojans, Priam’s city … to conquer it at last, after so many years … avenge the wrong done to his brother, yes, but, more, to win the decisive victory … and to do it without boastful, arrogant Achilles … how satisfying it would be!
Then, upon awakening to rosy-fingered Dawn, this very thing did Agamemnon at once set out to do. He summoned his fellow kings and leaders, and told them how, in dreams, the gods had bespoken him with good and urgent purpose, that Troy must fall. For a full day, they held war-counsel, which Achilles did not attend. There were those among them who felt bitterly for how Agamemnon had cheated the son of Peleus, yet, in the end, all were agreed.
They rallied their armies, those strong-greaved Achaeans. The ground shook beneath the multitudes, countless warriors taking their battle positions. At their backs were their ships, beached upon that wide Hellespont joining to the sea. Before them stretched the field of life and death, and beyond that, the walls of Troy.
Fear did dwell within many of their breasts. Nine long years now had this war been waged, and the bronze-armored Greeks knew well their foes. They knew of the cities and neighbors who’d answered Troy’s call for aid, and those wilder folk from far lands whose swords and spears were for hire. They had much cause to dread the slaughtering Hector as well, f
irst among the Trojan princes, first and best of the fifty sons of Priam.
They knew that Priam’s line and the noble houses of Ithilium ran rich with the deep-blood and star-blood of those strange immortal races against whose gods the high Olympians vied. They feared the very names of Azathoth, Hastur, Dagon and Yog-Sothoth … cruel Yidhra and Nyarlathotep … Yhagni, Shub-Niggurath … those dwellers out of the farthest darkness.
Yet, despite their fears, the Achaeans made their readiness. Whatever lofty reasons men might give for war—such as, this cause of betrayed Menelaus—in the end, they fought for simple reasons. They fought for the glory of their deeds, that their names would live on in song and history. They fought for the plunder of the fallen. They fought for the treasures of Troy itself: gold and conquered women, however strange their blood.
All their preparations wide-eyed Briseis watched. So, too, from where he sat darkly brooding, did Achilles.
Yearn though he might for the clash of arms and battle, he would not stir from his spot. The cleverest entreaties of Odysseus fell on deaf ears, as did the good counsel of old Nestor, wisest of them all. Achilles’ men, the Myrmidons, amused themselves with games of the discus. Their horses stood idle beside their chariots, and they did no fighting as the rest went forward onto the plain.
Paris, son of Priam, strutted forth draped in a leopard-skin, to give challenge to the Greeks. But when that challenge was answered by Menelaus of the loud war-cry, whose wife Paris had stolen, the prince of Troy fled back green-pallored, until his own brother, Hector, shamed him into doing his part.
It was agreed that the two, Menelaus and Paris, would meet in single combat, the winner to claim Helen and her possessions. Then the Trojans and Achaeans would make peace as friends, to let end the long hostilities at last.
So it might have been, had not the gods of both sides interfered. Weapons were glanced aside, armor straps snapped at crucial moments. When all else seemed failed, Paris was whisked away to safety by Shub-Niggurath’s intervention.