The Fire Seekers

by Richard Farr

  As she says this she pulls out a notebook, balances it on one knee, and starts scribbling. A crude ziggurat, stairs and all. Then she adds a single vertical wavy line, just like the symbol on the front of Quinn’s Anabasis, and looks at me. Finally she scrabbles in her bag, finds a red ballpoint, and starts adding more wavy lines at the top.

  Flames.

  “What do you think, D? What if all the ziggurats in the world are copies of something? Images of something? Little models—and what they are models of is a volcano?”

  “You’re saying the original Babel itself was a volcano?”

  “Remember what Partridge said to you. ‘Atlantis and Babel are the same story.’”

  After a short, uneventful hop to Crete, we’re met at Chaniá by Pandora Kallas.

  Far as I know, there were not many sources of friction in my parents’ marriage, but Pandora was one. This is, what, her fifth year working on Dad’s Greek obsession? Dive master, but also research assistant. A few summers back, a work crisis prevented Mom from joining us in Crete; somehow she got the idea that in her absence Dad and Pandora were becoming way too friendly. No idea whether it was true, but you couldn’t exactly blame Mom for worrying. Pandora’s closer to my age than theirs, shares a lot of Dad’s interests, has a PhD in marine archaeology. She’s also interesting, likable, fun. And then there’s the visual factor.

  Her eyes are like pools of molten milk chocolate. She has a halo of wavy golden hair, and cheekbones like cliffs I could fall to my death from. When she meets us, she’s wearing blue espadrilles, white Capri pants, and a very thin bleached-pink cotton shirt that has way too few buttons. In good news, I’m used to this. I’ve carried around with me for years the brightly colored mental snapshot that I collected on our first day together. Climbing back onto our dive boat near Agios Nikolaos, with a gallon of Mediterranean cascading off her wet suit, Pandora looked like a stunt double for the goddess Aphrodite.

  “Daniel! So good to see you again.” Big hugs and kisses. Her lips brush my ear, causing an instantaneous reaction down below that I could really do without. “And this must be the famous Morag. So nice to meet you! Welcome to Crete!”

  “Ya sas, Pandora,” says Morag. “Harika epitelous.”

  “Ah, the Morag language phenomenon! I did not know you speak Greek also.”

  “I don’t. Just three hundred and four words and seventy-eight phrases that I learned on the plane.”

  Pandora raises her eyebrows in appreciation, then turns back to me, her expression serious again.

  “OK. I have bad news and good news. But first tell me about your visit to Rome. How is the professor, and did you catch up with Bill?”

  I hold up my hand. “Rome was all bad news. But let’s get on the road. I’ll tell you in a minute.”

  She throws me a puzzled frown, but walks us over to her familiar Peugeot truck, with its rack of oxygen tanks in back. As soon as we’re in, she clunks it into gear and roars out of the parking area in a shower of gravel. As we head west across the Akrotiri peninsula toward town, I tell her everything: no idea about Dad, Partridge missing and apparently shot, Rosko missing and probably kidnapped.

  “This is terrible,” she says. “Nothing from Bill at all? And Partridge—I got a message from him only yesterday. Such a good, good man. Who are these people?”

  “We don’t know. But I think we’ve been spied on by the Seraphim in Seattle, Dad thinks they hacked his accounts, and Partridge was convinced he was being followed by them just before we arrived. The only good part is that we have the documents he was talking about, including the Geographika. I’m hoping you can translate them, maybe help us figure out where this third home is.”

  “You have the copy of the Geographika? With you?” She lets out a low whistle. “OK, so we need to get it—and you—somewhere safe. The boat is probably the best place away from prying eyes.”

  “How far?” Morag asks.

  Pandora puts her foot on the floor and glances at her watch. “Thirty minutes.”

  “So tell us your news.”

  “The bad part is, last night gunmen broke into the museum in Heraklion. They stole all four Disks.”

  “Seraphim?”

  She shrugs, focuses on the traffic for a minute. “Good news is, Professor Partridge left me a long voice message a few days ago. A bit strange, like he was trying to tell me something without actually saying it—”

  “He was probably drunk,” Morag says. “Or worrying that he would be overheard. Or both.”

  “He did describe to me what he found in the Biblioteca Angelica, and gave me some clues about what he thought it meant. It sounded so crazy that nobody could have invented it. And also it was quite easy to check.”

  “You’re telling me you already know where Cicero’s Disks were stored?”

  “Stored is the wrong word. But yes. I already found them.”

  In the manner of Greek drivers, she casually takes her eyes off the road and all but one finger off the wheel—just as we’re negotiating an intersection—in order to root around under her seat. I never get used to this kind of thing, but the creative driving doesn’t bother Morag. She’s staring out of the window, deep in thought.

  “Here,” Pandora says, handing me an unsealed manila envelope. I extract a single, grainy photograph. It looks black-and-white at first, but then you can see it’s just been taken in low light, underwater. Sand. Rocks. Wood. Several dozen small, round objects lined up in a neat row like dirty plates in a rack.

  Dirty salad plates.

  “Jesus.”

  “Beautiful, yes? Sitting under our noses all these years. Bill will be so happy!”

  Morag reaches forward between us and takes the photograph. “Bill won’t be happy unless he stays alive. Where are they?”

  For a few minutes, as we skirt the southern edge of Chaniá, Pandora doesn’t answer. Just concentrates on the traffic, her jaw set. When we leave town and start heading west along the coast road, she says:

  “I still can’t believe it. I still don’t understand it. He leaves this, this drunk message, which says something so ridiculous I almost don’t bother to check it out. But I had a free weekend, and I was curious.”

  She’s stalling, as if she doesn’t want to say something that will make me laugh at her. When she does say where the Disks are, I happen to be taking a swig from a water bottle. I nearly choke.

  “Antikythera? You have to be kidding.”

  “Hard to believe, I know. His message said, ‘They were Cicero’s ships, and there were two of them. The other one must be close by.’ And it is.”

  Pandora and I are so wrapped up in this—a famous wreck we thought we knew all about—that we’ve almost forgotten Morag.

  “Are you talking about the wreck where they found the Antikythera Mechanism?”

  Pandora’s eyes light up. “Quite a story. You know it?”

  “Homeschooled by Jimmy and Lorna Chen—aye, it came up. The first ancient shipwreck ever found, correct?”

  Pandora nods enthusiastically. “In 1900. Sponge-divers from the island of Syme. Just chance, it was—they took shelter from a storm, decided to see if they could find anything while they were waiting around. Put on their big old diving helmets and dropped over the side right into the debris field. Can you imagine? Hundreds of pots, jugs, plates—and life-size bronze statues just standing there on the sand, as if waiting for them.”

  “And,” Morag says, “a mangled chunk of metal that turned out to be the world’s first analog computer.”

  “That’s right. The Antikythera Mechanism was a complete shock. A thousand years too sophisticated. It attracts almost as many eccentric amateur theorists as the Phaistos Disk. You know how it goes—people assume the ancient Greeks were too primitive to make it, so therefore it was a gift from another planet. Anyway, we always assumed the ship was on its way to a rich Roman’s villa on the Italian coast. Now we know whose.”

  “How did you find the second wreck?” Morag asks.r />
  “Archaeology is not so different underwater. You need a system, and luck. I drew a circle around the original wreck and split it into ten identical segments. About a third of the water covered by the segments was too deep to dive safely. In what was left, the sonar gave me half a dozen interesting anomalies, so I checked them out. It wasn’t even one of them, in fact. Just happened to be right next to one, hidden in a trench.”

  A half hour’s drive turns into three. Halfway there we’re nearly sideswiped by a fuel tanker that overtakes us at 120 kilometers per hour on a bend. Pandora swerves as it cuts in ahead of us, hits a razor-sharp section of broken curb near a lonely bus stop, and gets a double flat. Half a dozen calls result in a long wait for a mechanic who shows up with the wrong tires. Then there’s a longer wait while he goes all the way back to Chaniá for the right ones. Afternoon stretches into evening. We end up grabbing a bag of dinner essentials at a village shop. The last shreds of light are already dissolving into the ocean when we arrive at the dock.

  “Good,” Pandora says when we’re aboard. “Food. Then the Geographika. You’re stuck here unless we can work out where Bill and your friend Rosko are. If we do, I’ll get you out of here in the morning. If not, Daniel, you can help me catalog the Disks while Morag keeps trying to work out what the third home is.”

  “There’s no question what Bill’s first priority would be,” Morag says. “Recover the Disks. It’s clear someone else is after them now, and I’m not surprised. In some way they hold the key to all this. I just hope we weren’t followed.”

  Despite all the years with Dad here, the thought of diving to retrieve Disks infuriates me. We should be finding Dad and Rosko. But she’s right: our only clue, our only hope, is the third home. And our only hope of finding that lies, perhaps, in the Geographika.

  Once we’ve motored a little way offshore, we feel secure on the boat. But it’s a work boat, not a yacht: the “accommodation” is a pilothouse big enough for one person who doesn’t mind sleeping curled up. So we sit under the canopy at the back, hunkered down amid the dive gear, and eat our picnic dinner—bread, graviera cheese, olives, taramasalata. Pandora uncorks a bottle of local wine and pours for all three of us. Morag takes a thirsty swig, and grimaces. Pandora passes her some fizzy water. I hold out my mug for a second round.

  The air is the temperature of blood. The lights on the harbor church at Kissamos are twinkling prettily. Every twenty seconds or so there’s a sound like fries dropping into hot oil as another wave washes across the beach. A little wine in the system, I manage to relax just a little. Only a seven-months-pregnant moon reminds me how little time we have to catch up with Quinn.

  Pandora eats only a few bites, carefully washes her hands, then powers up a deck lantern, unpacks the bag, and starts looking at our fragile whispers from the past.

  “No question,” she mutters after a few minutes. “This is the Geographika. And the letter is from Cicero. I feel like a criminal, reading such things on the back of a boat! I should be in an air-conditioned archive, wearing white gloves, with a guard standing over me.”

  We leave her to it for more than an hour, even when she mutters and exclaims under her breath. Morag settles herself cross-legged on the bow and seems to be meditating. I pass the time climbing around in the pile of dive gear, obsessively checking regulators, valves, O-rings—I’m driven by the superstitious hope that if I prepare carefully enough for our dive, it won’t be necessary, because Morag will have a blinding revelation about where we’re going to find Dad and Rosko.

  When there’s no more prep to do, I sit with a little whetstone and carefully resharpen my dive knife. All that relaxation gone now: I’m acutely aware of the seconds and minutes ticking away. At last Pandora closes the book, puts it carefully aside, and takes a big, thirsty pull from the wine bottle. Then she says, as if to the darkness:

  “Professor Partridge may have been drunk, and he may be a thief, but he was right.”

  “About what?” Morag asks.

  “Everything. Cicero’s ships, in the first place. The letter tells the whole story. He is visiting Rhodes, pays a lot of money for the best possible souvenirs, then ships them back ahead of him. Ships, literally: skaphe—the plural jumped out at me. The plan was for them to go from Rhodes to Rome by way of Crete—so they must have passed just north of here. One ship carrying mainly art, and the other his newly acquired diskoi.”

  “What about the Geographika itself?” Morag asks.

  “Ah yes. We were lucky with that one. Cicero says that for safety he will carry home his single most prized souvenir personally. ‘Beta’s book,’ he calls it—Beta was Eratosthenes’s nickname. Bill made fun of Partridge’s obsession, but it’s just as he suspected. This contains the true story of Atlantis.”

  Morag obviously thinks Pandora’s yanking her chain. “You’re kidding, right? Ancient Mystery Beneath the Waves? If this turns into a two-hour mockumentary with one of those doomy voice-overs from an ‘explorer’ who wouldn’t know real evidence from a hole in the ground, I’m going to scream. I hate that stuff.”

  “So do I, Morag. You forget that I’m an archaeologist too. But it’s not what you think.”

  “What’s so new?” I ask. “And are you going to tell me Atlantis is the third home?”

  “No.” She taps the Geographika again. “Our sole source for all those hundreds of stupid books and TV programs about Atlantis is half a dozen lines in Plato, written twenty-four centuries ago, and he was just repeating a story from the Athenian statesman Solon, who’d been playing tourist in the Nile Delta two centuries before that.”

  The whole idea of an ancient Greek tourist in Egypt is a little hard to swallow. “What, like with a tube of sunscreen and a Lonely Planet guide?”

  “Something like that. No camera, unfortunately. Anyway, Solon heard the story of Atlantis from an Egyptian priest. And the priest said it all happened a thousand years before that.”

  I’m keeping tabs on the dates with my fingertips. “So we’re talking 1500, 1600 BCE.”

  “Yes. An interesting date, in the eastern Mediterranean.”

  It does ring a bell. Not that I can figure out which bell—something from Dad’s book about the origins of the Bronze Age Collapse?

  Morag’s voice is reduced to a whisper. “The Thera eruption.”

  Pandora points across the water to the northeast. “Exactly. In 1628 BCE, one hundred and eighty kilometers that way, Thera erupted in one of the largest explosions ever recorded. This north coast was hit by tsunamis fifty, maybe a hundred meters high. And what I just read in this book is not a few lines of half-remembered myth. It’s a specific, detailed history, describing a powerful early civilization on Thera that we had no idea even existed. We always assumed it was just another outlying island. A few Minoan settlements and some goatherds. But Eratosthenes tells a wholly different story: he says it was the power center of the region. He says it was ‘the most ancient of all civilizations.’ ”

  She opens one of the Geographika scrolls, finds a passage. “Let me read you something. ‘Here, they say, the divine language was lowered down from heaven for the first time. Here, they say, the idea of cities and kings, of priests and the knowledge of eternity, was lowered down from heaven for the first time. They say that the greatest of all gifts, the fragment of the infinite within us, consciousness, was lowered down at Strongyle.’ And he calls it the first home of the gods.”

  “Wait,” I say. “Stron-GUY-li—that’s what Partridge said. When I spoke to him in Seattle. And—I didn’t make the connection before, but it was one of the first names in the Colberts’ folder list.”

  “Pandora,” Morag says, “if that’s a Greek word, what does it mean? Where does it come from? What’s the etymology?”

  “Strongulos means ‘round.’ Spelled s-t-r-o-g-g-u-l-o-s, but we slip an en sound in there. So, ‘the round place.’ ”

  “I knew it!” Morag says with a burst of girlish excitement. “I kept telling Bill he was wrong.
Wouldn’t listen. Stupid, stupid, stupid pigheaded oaf.”

  Gotta love Morag. This is the first time anyone has ever described my Dad, the great William Hayden Calder, as a stupid pigheaded oaf. But—“M, what are you talking about?”

  “This one unfamiliar word kept coming up in the tablets. Something related to circle, or curved. It has two forms, and Bill wanted it to be a reference to the Disks, so he kept insisting it must be a singular form and a plural: ‘the round thing’ and ‘the round things.’ Disks, obviously. But one of those words just kept on not making sense to me, in context. Now it does. The round things—the Disks—come from the round place. And that’s the real Babel.”

  Pandora and I are both just looking at her with our mouths open, trying and failing to formulate a question. She rolls her eyes at us.

  “Remember what I said in Athens? Not a ziggurat, not originally. The volcano at Strongyle was what every effing ziggurat in the world is a model of.”

  “But I’ve been to Thera. It’s crescent shaped, not round.”

  Her eyes widen fractionally. It means: Daniel, think. “Giant volcanic island sticking out of the sea? Cone with a bomb inside? It’s not round now.”

  “Right. Blew itself to pieces. Like Krakatoa.”

  “Aye. Except that Krakatoa was a zit compared to Thera.”

  I’m still not quite seeing it, though. “Wait. If there were all these people on the island, and it was such a big deal, why no archaeological remains? And where did they all go? They’re living around a great volcano—even if a lot of people were killed, wouldn’t there be records at least of, I dunno, fleeing refugees or something?”

  Pandora picks up the Geographika again. “Eratosthenes describes a civilization driven by, structured by, obsessed with religion. The religion was centered on a towerlike temple at the summit of the volcano, a place of communion with the gods. The temple kept being damaged or destroyed, over several centuries, and the whole culture was organized around constantly rebuilding it.”