"Ready," answered Taliesin, resisting the powerful urge to take a last backward glance toward the forest. They snapped their reins and galloped away.
FOURTEEN
THE FIRST TREMORS STRUCK KELUOS JUST BEFORE SUNRISE. Charis had awakened in the dead of night, feeling the sultry, stifling air thicken to a suffocating blanket. When she could no longer breathe, she rose and went to her balcony to stand before the softly shimmering city. Oceanus rolled restlessly in her bed; a smattering of stars shone red in the night-gray sky, and Charis knew that the end had come.
She accepted this with the icy calm of the bull pit and looked her last upon the sleeping city.
From out of the mountains far away she heard the deep, deep rumbling of summer thunder. So it begins, she thought. Dream on, Atlantis; the day of your death is upon you. Farewell.
She turned away as the rumble became a vibration, slight, insignificant. Dogs in the city began whining and howling. They knew. Soon everyone would know.
She dressed in the clothes she had chosen for this day—a simple, sturdy linen tunic with her wide leather belt and sandals from the bullring. With practiced fingers she braided her hair and bound it in the white leather thong, put her favorite golden chain around her neck, and walked quickly from her room to sound the alarm—a bell she had had installed in the center of the portico where it could be heard throughout the palace. With the last peals quivering on the air, Charis hurried on to Annubi's chambers.
She pushed open the door without knocking and stepped inside. Annubi was within, sitting at his small table, the Lia Fail before him in its gopherwood box, his eyes red-rimmed and tired. "It is begun," Charis told him.
He nodded and closed his eyes. "Yes," he whispered.
"Then gather your things and come with me to the harbor. We will wait for Belyn there."
"Belyn will not come," said Annubi. "I will stay here."
"No, I want you with me." The authority in her voice could not be argued with. Annubi shrugged and rose to his feet, hauling up a cloth-wrapped bundle. He thrust the Lia Fail into the bundle, gazed around the room one last time, and stepped toward the door.
The vibration had ceased, but the air still hung heavy and was now tinged with a sharp, metallic smell. The wailing of the dogs echoed through the palace like eerie music.
In the main corridor they met Lile, shaken and nervous, cradling a drowsy Morgian in her arms and holding tight to her courage. She rushed to meet Charis and, taking her hand, asked, "Is it time?"
"Yes," replied Charis. "Where is my father?"
"Why, asleep in his bed."
"Wake him and get on with your duties."
Lile hesitated. "Give me the child," Charis told her, lifting Morgian from her arms. "Go now. And hurry."
Lile fled back through the corridor. "Take Morgian," Charis told Annubi, handing him the little girl. The seer recoiled with distaste but accepted the child, who began crying after her mother. "Wait with the wagons," Charis instructed. Annubi shambled out into the trembling night.
Charis saw to each of the arrangements she had made, moving from one task to the next with cold efficiency. The last weeks had been physically and emotionally exhausting—amassing a small mountain of supplies and tools and packing it all, sealing what she could against seawater; rehearsing the plans she and Lile had made for evacuation with scores of unwilling, often contemptuous, royal functionaries; selling off palace treasures for ready gold and silver; buying and outfitting a fleet of fishing boats to carry people and cargo to deeper waters should need arise; supervising the loading of wagon after wagon with the raw materials for survival—a monumental labor, a tapping of deep, unknown reserves of energy, tact, and will. Now that the final dread moment had come, she could be calm. The world might well crumble around her, but the end would not see her rushing around in undignified panic. She woke those of her overseers still asleep and set them about their prearranged tasks. "Do not stop to think," she told the fearful. "Do exactly what we have planned and do it quickly."
In this way, when the first tremors shook the palace hours later, loosing a rain of roof tiles that clattered noisily down in the courtyard, the wagons were already assembled in ranks—ten rows, four abreast—passengers and drivers waiting. Horses reared, their eyes rolling with wild fright in the torchlight. Their handlers leapt forward to drag them down, blindfolding the animals with strips of cloth.
Charis stood on the steps, hands on her hips. "What can be keeping Lile? Must I do it all myself?"
"Princess Charis," came a voice nearby, "we should take the horses out. If the gates collapsed—"
"I know, I know! We are waiting for the king. Go back to your place."
The man disappeared, and Charis stomped back into the palace to find Lile and Avallach. The second quake struck as she hurried through the long gallery to the king's chamber. The stone flagging trembled beneath her feet and she heard a distant grinding sound—as if someone were crushing grain between two tremendous querns.
She burst through the door of her father's room to find Avallach fully dressed and sitting in a chair, Lile at his feet, begging him to get up and come with her. He turned his head as she entered. Ignoring Lile, Charis said, "Father, it is time to go. Everyone is waiting for you to lead them."
The king shook his head. "I must stay here. My place is here."
"Your place is with your people."
"Take Lile and the others. Leave me."
"We will not go without you, Father," she said firmly.
"You must go or you will die."
"Then we will die!" she snapped. "But we will not go without you."
Avallach rose slowly to his feet; Lile handed him his crutch and led him to the carriage where Annubi and Morgian already waited. Lile and Avallach climbed in and Charis signaled the driver to leave. As soon as the king's carriage cleared the gate, the other wagons rolled ahead, passing one by one through the outer gates as the ground trembled uneasily beneath the wheels.
Charis waited until the last wagon had cleared the gate and then mounted her horse, pausing in the darkness to look one last time at her ancestral home before leaving it forever. The wagons reached Kellios quickly but found the streets choked with people who had fled their homes and now rushed about in stark panic as one tremor after another shook the ground. The sound of their wailing was deafening. Charis rode forth, slashing her way through the tumult with her reins, forcing a way through for the wagons to follow. She led her entourage to the harbor and out onto the stone quay, where they stopped to await the ships all desperately hoped would come.
They waited and the sky lightened to a ghastly, sulfurous dawn. From the temple district came the mournful lowing of the bulls. A pall of dust hung over the city like a fog, motionless in the dead air. Annubi strode up and down the quay along the row upon row of wagons. At last he came to stand beside Charis. "It seems to be abating," he said. "The tremors are losing strength and frequency."
Charis looked down at his face, pale in the earthly light. "Then we may still have time," she said.
With the sunrise the tremors stopped and the frightened populace promptly forgot their fear and began going about their normal activities. Those waiting on the quay—nearly five hundred people altogether, the entire population of the palace: masons, artists, carpenters, farmers and herders, stewards and servants and palace functionaries of various types, along with their families, all of whom Charis had promised places in the boats—grew restless as they gawked around at a world that now appeared as solid and permanent as ever.
Charis remained firmly resolved, and as the early hours of the day passed she kept everyone busy transferring the cargo from the wagons to the fishing boats. The sun rose into a stark sky where it lingered interminably, pouring its white heat onto the baking earth below; and as the burning disk began its downward slide toward the sea, the last of the cargo was secured and still there was no sign of the rescue ships.
The city-dwellers scoffed at the crowd on
the quay, taunting, laughing outright, enjoying the spectacle. In the harbor, meanwhile, boats came and went as usual and Kellios itself behaved as if what had taken place only hours before were nothing out of the ordinary.
It was not until the shadows stretched long on the pier that Lile came to Charis and said, "The people are tired, Charis. Perhaps we should go back."
"No," Charis told her. "I am tired too, but we cannot go back."
"We could leave the boats, and if—"
Charis turned on her. "Go back to the palace, Lile, and you go to your tomb! There is nothing there but death."
Lile retreated to keep uneasy vigil with the others, and the long afternoon progressed without event. They ate a simple meal and listened to the nervous wash of the sea back and forth among the footings of the pier as the stifling dusk gathered over the bay, deepening rapidly to night.
And there on the quay, the air thick, oppressive, clinging, they were waiting when they saw the sky suddenly torn with streaking fire as burning stars tumbled earthward, piercing the unnatural stillness with the terrible shriek of their passing, smiting restless Oceanus.
The blazing starfall continued, throwing pillars of writhing steam high into the sky. People from the city poured onto the wharf to gape at the sight. No one laughed now.
From out of the mountains far away came the sound of a mighty and ominous rumble, and the crowd turned to stare in horror at burning stars striking through the heat haze, smashing to earth in a dazzling and deadly rain. Curtained by falling fire, the people of Kellios fled to the sea, swarming the quayside in chaos, fighting one another for places in the small fishing boats that now filled the harbor, bobbing in the uncertain swell and streaming blindly out into the night-dark sea.
"The boats are not coming," cried someone from one of the wagons. "We have to get away."
"Silence!" Charis snapped. "We wait."
"We're going to die!" someone else whined.
"Then we die like human beings, not fear-crazed animals!"
They waited. Dank, steamy vapors wafted in off the sea, which heaved with an oily swell. Kellios shuddered with the horrid rumbling, shaking the buildings on their foundations, toppling columns from their bases. Many, fearing that the quay would give way, ran screaming back into the city, trampling those who could not avoid them.
By sheer force of her will, Charis kept order among her people, moving amongst them, exhorting them to courage as she had so many times with her dancers in the bullring. Annubi found her pacing the quay, shouting down the fear mounting around her.
"If the ships do not come soon…"He paused.
"Yes?"
"We may have to go out to meet them."
"No," said Charis firmly. "We will wait here for them." She began pacing again.
Annubi fell into step beside her. "We have time yet, Charis. The boats are ready."
"Belyn will come," she said stubbornly.
"I do not doubt it. But he may not be able to reach us." He lifted a hand into the dead air. "There is no wind for the sails. The ships are floundering tonight."
Charis turned and peered into the darkness of the harbor and the jostling boats amassed there. "Perhaps you are right," she relented at last. "We have come this far; we can go farther if need be."
She turned and began shouting orders. The boats, ninety in all, had been lashed together in threes—two bearing cargo on either side of a passenger vessel. Under the direction of Charis' overseers the people dispersed among them. And one by one, as each passenger boat was loaded, they struggled into the harbor.
From out in the bay, the people looked back. They saw the sickly sky suddenly brighten in the west with a great light that flashed first yellow and then blood-red.
Silence descended over the land. The sea calmed.
Those in the boats held their breath, gripping the gunwales with bloodless hands.
The sound was felt first and heard afterward: the tremendous, shattering, shocking growl from the churning deep. The eastern sky flashed its strange lightning again as the hills began to buckle and quake. Kellios swayed precariously. Charis looked to the palace hill and saw flames flickering among the toppling walls. And over all was the dreadful, hateful sound.
In unthinking desperation, people threw themselves into the harbor to flounder and drown in their panic. Mothers waded into the sea holding their babes aloft. Terrified horses, loosed from their harnesses, careened along the shuddering beach.
The ground lost all solidity. Hills slid down into their valleys, met and melted together. Trees rippled and spun, their roots groaning and popping as the soil beneath them flowed away like water. Houses swayed and crashed into fluid streets, scattering flames and dust. The cries of those trapped on the shifting land assaulted the dusty air like the screams of frightened birds. The sea bubbled and churned as her bed rocked beneath her.
The sky convulsed and spewed fire upon the city. Brimstone, sizzling and stinking, streaked through the tortured air in flaming chunks, plowing furrows in the hills, pelting down into the heaving wreckage, destroying the temple in plumes of gray smoke and white fire. Stone burned; once-bright orichalcum rooftops melted and ran. Above the temple, soot-filled smoke rose thick in the air, bearing the stench of burning fat and flesh.
The whole countryside was soon engulfed in flame. Fire raked the hillsides; smoke billowed up and up to flatten and spread like an enormous hand on the upper wind, blotting out the new-risen moon.
The boats lurched in the troubled water as the stone quay collapsed and slid into the water, dragging screaming thousands with it. Charis watched it all with cold and ruthless objectivity, feeling nothing.
* * *
The destruction continued through the night as the boats bobbed and drifted in the harbor. The ghostly moon shone darkly over the bay, and vainly the survivors scanned the horizon for any sign of the rescuing ships. Charis watched the faces of those around her and saw grim hope dissolving slowly into despair as time dragged on. "They will come," she whispered to herself, knowing that as the boats drifted further and further away from land, their chances of survival decreased. "They will find us."
Near midnight Charis forced herself to swallow a mouthful of food and a little water. She slept and awakened at dawn to see the doomed land thrashing in its death throes…and still Belyn did not appear with the captured ships.
Atlantis writhed and heaved; the mountains sighed and shook themselves out like folds in clothing; the water crashed on the trembling shore; Kellios burned, and south, along the coast, the smoke from other cities ascended on high, darkening the morning sky to an unnatural twilight. All the while the stars struck down through the gloom, bursting on the ruined land and plunging into the water.
Slowly, terribly, remorselessly, on and on it went.
Near midday, though the sky was dark as deepest night, the iron-dark clouds over the land flashed orange and red. The air shivered and a searing wind flattened the waves as the sound reached them a moment later: an explosion so enormous that the sea stood up in sharp knifeblade waves and the concussion reached them first as a keening howl—which was the pressure wave ripping rocks and trees from the ground—and then as a deafening, sense-numbing roar.
Atlas itself had exploded in a volcanic seizure which split the mighty mountain from its snow-capped crown to its deep granite roots, hurling the pulverized mass into the tortured air. But before the debris could begin its freefall descent, another eruption gouged the middle from the mountain, gutting it in a fiery violet flash, spewing cinder and smoke and fire and molten stone high, high into the atmosphere. In the blink of an eye Atlas became a turbulent column of fire-streaked gas and smoke.
Battered and deafened by the horrendous blast, the people in the boats clung helplessly to one another—some moaning incoherently, others mute, all stunned and bewildered as whole mountain ranges crumbled and sank before their eyes.
The sea, choppy and confused, now boiled as the flaming rock and mud struck its litte
red surface. One boat, near Charis, was hit by a smoldering chunk of magma and sank instantly, dragging the two other boats down with it. Water cascaded over the nearby boats in a streaming spray.
Charis caught a movement out of the corner of her eye and turned her head toward land just in time to see the tidal wave cast up by the explosion, rushing at them with stupefying speed.
The people sat paralyzed as the wall of water swept nearer; there was no time to scream or look away. Charis felt the boat tilt up beneath her and clawed at one of the thick cargo ropes as the wave slammed into the boat, lifting it high and rolling it over in a single sweeping motion.
Sky and sea changed places. All was wet, choking darkness. Charis' hands were ripped from the rope and she was slammed against the gunwale. She would have been thrown from the boat but for the water cascading over her, pressing her down with crushing force.
It happened in an instant. The boats rolled, righted, and the tidal wave rushed on, leaving the survivors half-drowned and gasping for breath. Charis dragged herself upright coughing and sputtering, regurgitating bitter brine; she shook the stinging water from her eyes. The other boats spun in the swell, some of them listing heavily, full of water, and Charis saw that there were fewer now than there had been moments before.
The sky was a gruesome gray-green soup of cloud and smoke, tinged with angry red streaks above the earth where the disemboweled remains of Atlantis trembled and quaked, her once-fair body broken and sundered by hideous paroxysms. The people looked on dumbly, mouths slack, eyes dead with shock.
The boats drifted. Time hung suspended between day and night in a hideous twilight, volcanic steam and smoke steadily clotting the sky, and the dire sounds of fatal convulsions still rumbling across the water. Oceanus grew gradually more calm until the only sound heard was the gentle slap of water and the occasional chunk of floating debris nudging the sides of the boats.
Charis, raising her head now and then, continued to scan the far horizon. But as the numbing hours passed, even her steadfast spirits began to flag and she made her reconnaissance less frequently. The day passed, to be followed by a long, wearying, fitful night in which sleep came as a blessed refuge, too brief by far. The survivors—less than three hundred remaining—huddled in the drifting boats and gazed at their tortured land, trembling beneath its torment.
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