‘But a wave couldn’t come this far inland.’ She glanced behind them, then gasped, turning back and urging Pegasus even faster.
Nikko looked back too. At first there was only darkness. And then he realised it was real darkness—something so huge it blotted out the stars. Only the moon still floated high above, oblivious to the mass of water rearing up below her.
How fast could a thunder wave surge? Faster than a horse could gallop? Harpers never tell you details like that, thought Nikko desperately, just how whole cities were washed away, clasped back by the ocean to lie crumpled in the sand.
The noise filled the world. A drift of spray splattered on his cheek. But the wave was still far behind him; it was the wind that threw the spray.
Onward…and further on…Pegasus’s breath came in tearing gasps. How long could she go on like this?
The world behind them exploded. The roaring changed into a crash. Suddenly water swirled around them, a giant swirl of foam in front, almost glowing in the moonlight. It was around Pegasus’s feet, then rising to her knees. Nikko could feel his legs wet too. But still the big horse struggled to keep going.
The water grew shallower the further on she fought. Then all at once it began to move again, sucking like a giant slurping at a gourd. They could feel Pegasus struggle to stay standing, not to topple backward and be washed with the thunder wave back into the sea.
Then it was gone. The water, the noise. The stars were back. Someone screamed, far inland, but behind them all was quiet.
Pegasus stopped, her breath labouring. Her skin was white with foam, whether sweat or seawater they couldn’t tell. And there in the darkness Nikko and Euridice clung together, the only two humans left it seemed in a world of devastation.
No one behind us, thought Nikko, could have survived a wave like that.
Suddenly Euridice pulled out of his arms as though only now aware of what she was doing. ‘What do we do next?’ Pegasus’s breathing was nearly normal again, though she occasionally shivered.
‘Keep going. A little way at least.’ He vaguely remembered a harper’s tale where another thunder wave had followed the first. ‘Wait till daylight.’
He felt rather than saw Euridice nod as she urged Pegasus a little further up the road, then off into the trees.
It was wild country here, too rocky for the plough or vines or olive trees. But there were bushes that would hide them from the road. Best of all, as Nikko and Euridice slipped off her back, Pegasus stepped forward cautiously on the strange ground and found a tiny stream, wending its way through the rocks.
Nikko checked the water for salt, then let the horse drink and they drank themselves. Euridice took off her robe to rub the sweat and spray and salt from Pegasus’s coat. The blanket was damp, but it was wool, so should help keep her warm till morning. Euridice tore a strip off the bottom of her tunic to tie the horse’s bridle to a tree. It would keep the big horse from wandering off in the darkness, but still allow her to crop at the grass between the trees.
As for them: Nikko had only his kilt. His chest and arms were bare apart from his jewels. Tomorrow they might be worth a fortune. Tonight they sat cold on his skin. Euridice’s butterfly wings are heavy silk, he thought. They would be warm.
‘Come here,’ she said gruffly.
He had wondered what it would be like to touch her. He had never dreamed it would happen like this, both of them shivering with shock and exhaustion. They sat together against a tree, wrapped in the folds of the costume, dozing rather than sleeping, till dawn grew grey at the edges of the sky.
CHAPTER 37
The world was grey too. No birds sang. Nikko had expected the thunder wave to have covered the earth with sand. But instead there was only silt—or silt and sand perhaps, for surely dirt would have been darker.
He stepped over to the road, and looked around. They had been nearer to the sea than they realised, for he could see it a short ride away, grey as the sky, but flat now, as though it had never had the power to rear over the land. He could just make out dark blobs bobbing in the water. The sea had stolen the shapes of the drowned it seemed, as well as their lives. Suddenly he realised Euridice was standing behind him. Pegasus was tearing at the grass as though it was the most important thing in her world. Which Nikko supposed it was.
Life is much easier for a horse, he thought, with your decisions made for you. ‘Come on. Let’s get away from here.’
To his surprise Euridice shook her head. ‘No.’ She waved at the greyness the sea had left. ‘We need to search out there.’
Nikko stared. ‘Why? There’s no one left alive.’
‘Exactly. There’ll be bodies.’ Euridice gestured at a goat he hadn’t seen before, its head at a strange angle, lying tangled against a bush. Her voice was almost steady as she added, ‘We can take what we need from them.’
‘Steal from the dead!’
‘They don’t need it now,’ said Euridice fiercely. ‘We do. And we can scatter dirt upon anyone we see, and say the words to give them safe passage to the Underworld.’
She’s right, thought Nikko. His skin crawled at the thought of going back into that desolation. What if another thunder wave rose from the sea? He gazed around. A pair of swallows darted overhead, hunting flies. But the feeling they were crossing into the realm of the dead stayed with them. Even Pegasus baulked, and they had to lead her the first few steps, before she allowed them up to ride.
But in the end it was nowhere near as bad as he had feared. The sea’s strength had scoured the worst back into its own realm, leaving a world almost washed clean.
Almost. He stared down at two men, twisted together around a tree, almost looking like one man with four arms and legs. Only one head was visible, the mouth open in a scream no one would ever hear. But both men had swords, and spears and knives belted to their sides—good ones, bronze with wooden handles traced with silver—and one had a bow and arrows on his back.
Euridice kneeled down. ‘Have you ever used a sword?’
‘No.’
‘A bow and arrows?’
‘No.’
‘Soft city boy,’ she mocked again. ‘A boy with a beard coming who’s never held a spear.’
‘I’ll learn,’ he said fiercely. ‘And I can use a spear.’ Or I could years ago, he thought. He hadn’t handled a weapon since he was ten.
She looked at him thoughtfully. ‘I think you will. You take the spear, and a knife and a sword. I’ll take the bow. Their clothes should fit you. Me too, with a bit of tuck and trimming.’
Nikko tried not to shudder. ‘I’ll undress them. Not you.’
‘Yes.’
At least, thought Nikko, she knows how unseemly it would be for her to see a man naked. And yet it was women who laid out the dead, who brought babies naked into the world.
He shook his head. He was hungry, so hungry his stomach has stopped growling and his mind was giddy. It must be the same for Euridice.
He stripped the men quickly while she looked the other way. They must have been guards, though Nikko didn’t recognise either from the palace. Perhaps they served one of the minor kings. The tunics and trousers were good leather, and one of the men had a pouch too, with flint and sky iron to start a fire, and a leather bag of shelled pistachios.
At last it was done. He used his hands to shovel silt over the bodies, muttering the words of prayer, hearing Euridice mutter different words behind him. He pressed turquoises into each man’s armpits, where thieves—other thieves, he thought grimly—wouldn’t find them. At least now the dead men’s spirits could rest, instead of roaming the world forever. The precious stones would give them comfort and status in the underworld, and help pay the ferryman across the river. Suddenly he felt calmer. They had done their best for them, as the dead guards had unwittingly done for them. But despite their hunger, neither he nor Euridice began to eat the pistachios until they were well away into the clean land untouched by the thunder wave, heading north east, up toward the mountains.
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CHAPTER 38
The nuts hardly scratched the edges of their appetites. But to Nikko’s delight he brought down the first game of the day, with a slingshot made of a bit of leather found amongst the debris.
It was a hare, fat from summer eating. They stopped to make a fire to cook it. Although they still kept away from the road, they had lost the first desperate terror of pursuit. With the earthquake, the wave, and the death of the High King, whoever was in charge at Mycenae would be thinking about far more than two escaped performers.
His mind drifted to the Chamberlain. Had the man really waved at him to go? You can know a man half your life, almost, thought Nikko, pulling a dry dead branch from a tree, and never know him at all.
Even Thetis was no longer a threat to anyone at Mycenae. Her prophecy was in the past now. Nikko made an automatic fist of homage to the earth, in thanks that his sister hadn’t thought to make a second prophecy as she stood up on the parapet at Mycenae.
Their main danger now would be bandits, or even village men who might guess that no one would miss two travellers—or their valuables. It was still best to stay out of sight.
Nikko skinned the hare and gutted it, then threaded a branch of green wood through its mouth and legs, and held it over the flames to cook. The air above the fire shimmered with heat, but without much smoke. They waited as long as they could bear, then tore at the meat half cooked, roasted the bones in the coals and sucked out the marrow.
They slept that night in a cave that smelled of long-gone wolf, with dust for a floor and small piles of animal bones in the corners. Outside rain flung tiny hammers onto the ground.
Nikko would have liked to spread the saddlecloth for them both to lie on, while they used Euridice’s robe for a cover. But there was no way he could suggest it. They no longer needed the warmth of each other’s bodies. It would be too easy to wake in the night, to pull her drowsily closer. If Euridice was to go to the temple she must stay a maid.
He glanced over at her, asleep already, wrapped in the grimy silk wings. Something else had stopped him too. This was a new Euridice, freed of any need to pretend to her captors. Perhaps he too would be different, away from the expectations of Mycenae. He couldn’t touch her now, not while the shock held them both, when she might accept him for comfort or, even worse, from pity. In a few days, a half moon perhaps, when the dust of Mycanae and their lives there had been washed away, they might both see thing differently.
We are all changed, he thought, as the world drifted away. Me, Euridice. Even Thetis, wherever she is, must face a different life now.
Pigeons plucked at the autumn grass seeds outside the cave when he woke next morning, despite the drizzle thickening the air. Nikko’s sling got two of them on the ground, and a third in the air.
They lit a fire at the mouth of the cave, away from drips from the overhang, and cooked the pigeons, and ate them with handfuls of watercress from the stream down the hill, while Pegasus tore at the damp grass. Nikko would have tethered her again, but Euridice seemed to assume that the big horse would now stay. She had been right, for when they’d woken Pegasus was sheltering at the front of the cave, the smell of wet horse and droppings stronger now than the scent of wolf.
They took it in turns to wash in the creek, then ate the leftover pigeon, nibbling at the bones as the rain lifted like a shield from the valley, leaving the morning blue and gold.
‘Nikko?’
‘Yes?’ He looked up from the bone he was chewing to find her watching him.
‘Why do you protect your sister? Give up your whole life for hers?’
‘Not all of it.’
‘Most of it then.’
He looked out over the trees, gleaming diamonds on their leaves after the rain. ‘A brother owes duty to his sister.’
She snorted, sounding a bit like a horse. ‘You owe duty to your King, but you’re not back there repairing the Lion Gate.’
He looked at her impatiently. ‘Well, do you have an answer?’
‘Love,’ she said, after a pause. ‘I’ve watched you. Everything you do is for love. For your sister, for Dora and Orkestres.’
He laughed. ‘What about the times I rode out of Mycenae by myself, just to feel the wind in my hair?’
‘That was love too,’ she said positively. ‘Like my love for the Mother.’ She saw he didn’t understand. ‘The Mother is everything that lives, the barley shoots, the heads of summer wheat, the lambs in spring.’
‘So every time I rode, or danced, or played the lute, I was doing it for the Mother?’
‘Yes. For love of the world around you. You are the only man I have ever known, Nikko, who does things for love. Not for anger, or pride, or gain. Just love.’
He was silent, not knowing what to say. ‘What about you?’ he said at last.
She stood up, and brushed the dust and horse hair from her trousers, not looking at him. ‘I will go to the shrine a maiden,’ she said softly. ‘That was what was promised, and that was what I’ll give. Come on. We’d better make the most of the daylight, so we can find another place to shelter us tonight.’
They travelled north, using the sun and moon as their guide, hoping that they could ask for directions to the shrine when they were well past the Isthmus and the lands controlled by the King of Thebes, who, if he had survived the destruction of Mycenae, would certainly remember the pair whose act had heralded the quake.
Storms flung the last of the autumn leaves onto the ground. The wind grew teeth as winter strengthened; at times sleet stung their faces; at other times they had to detour nearer to the coast to avoid a mountain pass full of snow; but mostly they tried to stay in the high country, where there was less likelihood of being seen. No one from Mycenae would be chasing them—not in winter, or possibly at all. But there were bandits to worry about, even though they had hidden the gold and jewels in their blanket rolls.
It should have been hard; travellers risked their lives, wandering in winter. But Euridice seemed to find caves almost by instinct, and somehow the blizzards were always behind them or in front, and small animals coming out to graze in the sparse winter sunlight were easy prey for Nikko’s sling. Some nights they spent in summer huts, where herd boys took the goats or cattle up to graze in the heat, leaving them now for the warmer weather of the plain.
Several times Nikko rode into a village alone, pretending to be a lost messenger on some king’s business. He could trade a piece of turquoise or a garnet the headman could give his wife in return for bread or flour if no one had baked enough for strangers. Flour was lighter, but it spoiled too easily when it rained. At least they could dry the bread again, toasting it on the fire.
Meat there was in plenty, from his sling and her arrows, and there was grass enough for Pegasus under the frost. They made sure that she had ample time to graze each day, never taking her too far. If the way was steep Euridice would slip off, and Nikko follow her, so the three of them were on foot, instead of two riding and one carrying.
Sometimes, when they came to a stretch of grass, they would let Pegasus have her head and gallop till she chose to stop, her riders yelling for the sheer joy of speed and freedom. Yet Euridice never played any of her horse-dancing tricks now, though Nikko never asked her why. Perhaps, he thought, this journey is all the challenge she needs.
Some mornings Nikko would find her whispering to the horse, as though telling her secrets she couldn’t share with him. Pegasus would snuffle at her fingers, and nod or paw the ground, almost as if she understood.
He had never thought he would feel friendship with a horse. But as the weeks went by Nikko realised that was what she was—a friend. Horses too, it seemed, did things for love.
CHAPTER 39
The hut had been abandoned years before, its owner—dead of fever, age or hunger or killed by brigands—some eccentric who didn’t see the need to live inside a stockade with others for protection. But the half roof remaining still gave them shelter, and the hearthstone out the front e
ven had bread stones, so they could bake proper loaves instead of dough wrapped around a stick.
Euridice had shot an arrow into a deer the day before. They’d gutted the beast, and stripped it of its hide. It seemed a pity to leave it, but they had no time to tan it, and wool blankets were lighter to carry. They had acquired several trading in the villages.
They could see the smoke from a village now, spiralling up from among the trees below them. They slit the beast along the backbone, then Nikko loaded half the meat onto Pegasus and headed down toward the smoke to trade the meat for flour. At least in the cold they could carry fresh meat for days without worrying about flies or rotting.
Euridice had the fire alight when he got back to the hut, and the saddle cloth and their blankets propped up on sticks to dry. Even when it didn’t rain they were somehow always damp at the end of each day. She’d gathered watercress, and wild oregano and thyme too; the meat was roasting on a spit, the scent of bread from their last lot of flour mingling with the venison juices. She looked up and smiled as Pegasus clopped into the clearing, then bent down again to turn the spit.
It looked so—homelike—that Nikko felt his heart clench within his ribs. This could have been his life, and hers, the life that had been robbed from both of them.
Did he want a life like this? A villager, with fields and goats and children?
A year ago he would have said his dearest wish was to perform for the High King long past the time when he would have to dye his hair, to continue to be ambassador to the great houses, to chat with kings and lords until the time came to settle quietly by the fire, and tell harpers the stories of his travels.
And now? He fingered his beard absentmindedly. It had grown during the moons of travel. It probably looks like a goat’s beard, he thought tolerantly, for he was still too young to grow a thick one, and there were no bronze mirrors here to show him his reflection so he could trim it. His hair must have grown out shaggily too, after he had shorn it for Orkestres. But now—far from the eye make-up, the perfumes and warm baths of Mycenae—he had stopped caring how he looked.
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