Blood of the Heroes

by Steve White

  “Months! But that means it may be autumn by now! So it’s possible that already the—”

  Realization of what Nagel was about to say brought Jason struggling up out of shock.

  “Well, we’ll find out soon, won’t we?” he interrupted, forcing heartiness into his voice and clapping Nagel on the shoulder. That brought the historian’s eyes around to stare at him. He met those eyes with a look that not even Nagel could misinterpret. Then he turned back to Oannes. “Tell us what’s waiting for us in Crete.”

  “The pirate ship will have landed at Amnisos, the port of Knossos. There, you will be turned over to the Minos and conveyed to the palace.”

  “We’ve heard that title before,” Nagel said eagerly. “Zeus used it. In our culture’s myths, ‘Minos’ is the name of a king of Crete around whom many legends clustered—several generations’ worth of them, in fact. For that reason, it has been widely supposed that ‘Minos’ was a title, like ‘Pharoah’ in Egypt.”

  “That is essentially correct. He is the priest-king. The priesthood in Crete is largely female, due to Rhea’s primacy there. But the supreme head is required to be a warrior as well as a priest. That tradition has survived even though all of Crete has long since been so totally subservient to the rule of Knossos and its ‘gods’ that fortifications are unnecessary.”

  Another blow to the chops for poor old Sir Arthur Evans , Jason reflected.

  Nagel’s mouth was half open with another question when Oannes spoke hastily. “They are coming, doubtless to lead you to the portal. While this chamber is open, I will slip away. Remember: you must not reveal my existence to any of them except Zeus, who already knows.”

  “But what will you be doing?” Nagel asked.

  “What I can.” And Oannes was gone from sight, just as the door slid open to admit Zeus.

  Jason expected to be whisked back to what he thought of as the “reception area” on one of the open aircars. But, as was often the case, Teloi behavior did not follow what seemed wholly logical patterns. They were marched through the endless corridors with Zeus in the lead. A couple of the hovering robots—no waiters these, fitted with paralysis weapons rather than dishes—followed watchfully behind.

  “I’ve had time to think things through,” Nagel whispered, emboldened by Zeus’ seeming indifference to their presence. “Santorini—or ‘Kalliste’ as I suppose we should call it, since it’s still one large island, not yet reduced to the islets of the Santorini group—must not have exploded yet, even if it is now autumn. After all, if the Teloi are aware that we’ve arrived in Crete, they must also be aware of conditions there. They could hardly have missed such a cataclysm!” He sounded positively chipper.

  “That makes sense,” Jason whispered back. “Only …” He hesitated, and once again he heard that mocking echo of his own voice: “No point in upsetting people with things they don’t need to know… .”

  To hell with that! he thought savagely. Sidney has a right to know. I told him we’re all in this together. Did I mean that, or was I just farting at the wrong end?

  ” ‘Only’ … ?” Nagel queried.

  “There’s something you haven’t thought of, Sidney,” Jason whispered harshly. “Remember what I told you about the TRDs? They activate automatically, at a preset time. And the timer uses an internal atomic clock. It’s been ticking away while we’ve been in this mini universe—ticking at the same rate at which time moves here.”

  Nagel still looked blank. Jason drew a deep breath and reminded himself to continue speaking in a whisper.

  “It hasn’t ticked enough while we’ve been here, Sidney! As far as it’s concerned, we’ve only spent a couple of days while the outside universe—the universe that includes the displacer stage in twenty-fourth century Australia—has spent weeks or months, according to Oannes. It’s going to keep on ticking, until it reaches its preset number of ticks—which it won’t do until weeks or months after it’s supposed to, as far as the linear present is concerned.”

  Horrified understanding began to dawn in Nagel’s face.

  “So,” Jason continued inexorably, “we won’t appear on the stage at the moment we’re scheduled to—an event unprecedented in the history of the Temporal Regulatory Authority. Instead, we’ll appear at some point in time weeks or months later. Rutherford will have no way of knowing when that will be.”

  “And therefore won’t know when to make sure the stage is clear for us,” Nagel said tonelessly.

  “You’ve grasped it,” Jason sighed.

  Then they could talk no longer, for they emerged into the “reception area”—the tiered, domed chamber from whose circumference the five main corridors receded like the spokes of a wheel. A live Teloi now sat at the small control panel where Perseus had left a dead one, and other tall alien figures stood about, waiting.

  But Jason had no eyes for any of it. Another Teloi emerged from another of the five archways, leading another two humans.

  “Deirdre!” he called out.

  She looked around wildly, and grasped Perseus’ arm more tightly. “Jason!” she shouted, spotting him.

  But now there was something that had been absent when Jason had been here before, cut off by the dying hand of a Teloi. An immaterial three-yard hoop glowed in midair, and the eye flinched away from what was within it. Then, without any transition the eye and the mind could perceive, the hoop was gone and there was a hole in reality through which the light of the Mediterranean sun could be glimpsed.

  Was it just Jason’s imagination, or did that sunlight have a quality of autumn about it?

  Chapter Seventeen

  The four humans were herded together and prodded forward. Their accustomed weight returned as they stepped across the intangible boundary and Earth’s gravity reasserted control. Then they were through the portal, and the natural world was all around them, marred only by the circle through which the Teloi’s extradimensional construct could be glimpsed like a smudge of something that should never have been.

  Jason would never be religious. But as he stood in the sunlight and looked around at the sea and the land and the sky as they were intended to be, he thought he understood what it was that religious people felt.

  The port of Amnisos was at the mouth of what passed for a river in Crete, a break in the yellow cliffs that made the island’s coast so forbidding. The idol was still on the ship, but the portal had opened near the base of a mole which extended out into the water from a rough seawall, behind which brightly painted houses—some of them three or four stories—stood in ranks on the terraced shore. The paint—predominantly blue and white and red—could not compete in gaudiness with the crowd that now sank in one vast genuflection to the ground that Zeus’ feet had touched. The peacock feathers on the men’s turbanlike headdresses drooped and brushed the ground as they groveled, as did the less showy plumage on the women’s small hats. From Jason’s standpoint, those hats were the least exotic item of local feminine apparel—and the least interesting. They wore ankle-length, multilayered skirts, and tight, embroidered bodices that left the breasts exposed save for a wisp of translucent fabric. By contrast, the men wore little more than a combination of girdle and shorts. Both sexes wore an astonishing amount of makeup and jewelry.

  Zeus spoke in a voice of rolling thunder. Jason decided the artificial amplification probably came from a tiny device stuck with adhesive to the divine throat. His words were addressed to a man kneeling before a thronelike chair on a platform resting on the backs of eight crouching slaves, and were spoken in the language of the islands, which Jason couldn’t understand. But the Teloi must have granted permission to stand, for the man rose to his feet amid a general indrawing of breath at the stupendous honor being done him.

  Perseus gasped. “The Minos himself! Here! He almost never leaves the palace.”

  Jason looked at the priest-king more closely. He wore a long, elaborate, deep-blue robe and an even more elaborate golden dress helmet shaped to suggest a bull’s head, complete
with horns. Even through the makeup that made his age impossible to estimate, his expression was unmistakable: bred-in arrogance currently overlaid with terror. The look was reflected in his voice as he spoke a response.

  “Can you understand what they’re saying, Perseus?” Jason whispered.

  “Partly. On Seriphos, where I grew up, the common people speak a tongue much like that of Keftiu. Zeus has commanded the Minos to take us to the palace at Knossos and present us to the goddess Rhea. He is also to take the idol—it is to be in his care for a time. He also says … I couldn’t really understand this part, Jason. He said you and Synon and Deianeira have affronted Cronus himself. What does he mean by that?”

  Jason remained silent. Behind him, he heard Nagel mutter, “Cronus—the god of time.”

  “There’s something else, Jason,” Perseus continued in a troubled voice. “But surely I must have misunderstood it. I thought he said something about the sailing season being over, which was one of the reasons the idol is being left in the Minos’ keeping for now. But how can that be, Jason? That’s not until the autumn gales blow. And yet … the wind does seem to be blowing strongly from the west, doesn’t it? And it seems cooler than it ought to be. What does it mean, Jason? What has happened?”

  “I don’t know,” said Jason. What else am I supposed to say? he asked himself. Himself gave no answer.

  The formalities came to an end. Zeus’ “chariot” floated through the portal by itself, to a collective sound of rapturous awe from the crowd. Remote control, Jason thought, must seem supernatural here. Zeus boarded the aircar and flew away to the south. And, at what must have been a preset moment, the portal vanished.

  It reminded Jason of something he had neglected for a while. He summoned up the map spliced into his optic nerve, and confirmed his near certainty. Only Nagel’s TRD showed. Deirdre’s must still be in the Teloi’s pocket universe—a hole into which the dirt had just been pulled.

  Then he remembered something else. He looked to the north, out to sea, at the horizon beyond which lay Kalliste, whose fragments would later be named Santorini.

  Rising from that horizon was a faint tendril of smoke.

  He and Nagel made eye contact. No words were needed.

  The crowd dispersed, most of the dignitaries going to the slave-borne litters that Jason now noticed in the background. Other slaves, under the pompous supervision of priests, put the idol on a stretcherlike framework that seemed inadequate to carry it. Four of them lifted the framework up and conveyed the idol to a solid-wheeled cart drawn by garlanded oxen. It trundled off between the houses and onto the Knossos road, followed by the Minos on his super-litter (which was what he’d been standing on, atop the slaves’ backs). That potentate was now seated but—Jason thought with a certain grim satisfaction—forced to breathe the oxen’s dust as the idol preceded him. The prisoners were taken in hand by a squad of soldiers, equipped much like their mainland counterparts Jason had seen at Tiryns, complete with figure-eight shields covered with oxhide, but with more of an air of disciplined military polish. They fell in at the rear of the procession, and trudged along a road that wasn’t the same as the one they’d taken from Herakleion in the twenty-fourth century, but which led through a landscape that was strangely similar despite being more forested … although the slave gangs toiling in the olive groves and orchards were a jarring touch.

  After a time, the road joined the one with which Jason was familiar—or at least its ancestor. So he knew what to expect when they neared the foothills of the distant mountain range. Or at least he thought he did. But then they passed beyond the screen of cypresses.

  Jason had seen Sir Arthur Evans’ reconstructions, and he had seen numerous artists’ conceptions. Neither had prepared him for the sheer impact of tiered and terraced colonnades, crowning the ridge and covering its slopes with loggia after stepped-back loggia, rank after rank of downward-tapering red pillars, the roofline crowned with stylized bulls’ horns that arrogantly gored the sky.

  His intellect reminded him of the pyramids and the Great Wall of China, and insisted that, like those, Knossos embodied nothing that couldn’t be accomplished with enough slaves and enough time. The rest of him knew he was seeing something that did not belong in this era.

  He felt the collective motion of the column halting, and looked back over his shoulder. Perseus had stopped dead as though from a blow to the gut. He had never seen, or imagined, such a place as this. What must he be feeling? Jason wondered. The Teloi pocket universe was a thing of the gods, so it was supposed to be incomprehensible. But he knows what man-made things are like, and he knows this cannot be one of them.

  Nagel had also halted, but his face wore another expression. It was not an expression Jason could put a name to. But he knew that if they all died in the next hour, Nagel would count it worthwhile.

  “Move, dog dirt!” growled a guard in heavily accented Achaean. He prodded Perseus in the back with his spear butt.

  The numbed expression vanished from the Hero’s face, replaced by something else. Jason knew what that something was, and he braced himself for the explosion of superhumanly swift violence that would leave half the guards dead or dying and the other half looking down on four corpses… .

  But then Deirdre touched Perseus’ arm and whispered something inaudible in his ear. The moment passed. They all stumbled forward.

  The procession followed the road past villas that would have been impressive in any other setting, with an outdoor amphitheater in the distance to the left. Here the oxcart turned left and moved away toward the northern end of the palace. The rest of them continued on before turning, and approached the palace from the west across a kind of open plaza. They entered through a propylon with a great red lintel-column rising from its gleaming floor. “The West Porch,” Nagel said, not seeming to care who heard him … and Jason knew where he was, in terms of what he had seen in the twenty-fourth century. He also knew that something was missing.

  “Sidney,” he whispered, as they were waiting for the Minos to descend, stepping on the back of a slave who crouched to serve as his step stool. “Where are the frescoes?”

  “What?” Nagel shook himself out of the trance he’d fallen into as he avidly sought to memorize everything his eyes took in. “Oh, yes. They haven’t been painted yet. That has been recognized for a long time … that is, it will have been recognized for a long time in our era … oh, you know what I mean! Anyway, the frescoes we associate with Knossos date from the period of the New Palace—slightly later than this, although much is unclear about just exactly when and how the transition took place. Equally unclear is the reason for the artistic efflorescence that will take place then. But it appears that the basic structure of the palace has reached its final form by now, as has long been suspected.”

  Then further conversation became impossible as the procession got moving again. They entered through a doorway to the left, and proceeded along a long corridor whose floor of cemented stone slabs had a central causeway of gypsum. (“The Corridor of the Procession,” Nagel murmured.) Eventually the passageway took a right turn, and a terrace with a loggia could be glimpsed through openings to the right, giving light. More light came from an open area to the left, which they passed through and entered an elaborate entryway. (“The South Propylaeum,” Nagel’s monologue continued.) Beyond was a wide staircase, open to the sky, atop which was a vestibule giving entry to a vast colonnaded hall into which light filtered from an open corridor to the left and glinted on the spearpoints of the ranked guards. They turned again, crossing the cement-paved corridor under the sky, and entered the vastest hall yet, its roof supported by two massive central columns. Here, the Minos settled onto a gypsum throne set against the far wall, and the courtiers took their ceremonial places. The guards prodded the four prisoners forward to stand before the throne, at a considerable distance.

  It was undeniably an impressive display of architecture, especially considering that all this mass was on the second story.
(Jason recalled, with the help of his implant, that it rested on great masonry piers on ground level, where the storerooms for the Minos’ treasure were located.) But it all had a hieratic oppressiveness that not even the ubiquitous light wells could alleviate. These walls were painted, but only in uninspired geometric patterns. Nowhere was there any trace of the dazzling frescoes—the naturalistic, life-affirming art that later ages would link admiringly with the Minoans. The insistent background chanting and the pervasive smell of incense didn’t help.

  Then the crowd parted as a line of women entered from a door to the right. They were dressed in the usual way, except that their breasts lacked even the largely symbolic covering provided by the usual translucent chemises, and their long dresses had even more layers and flounces, dyed in every color of the rainbow. The one in the lead seemed middle-aged—although it was hard to tell, through the makeup that practically disguised her membership in the human family. She wore a tall, gilded headdress shaped like a tapering cylinder, its surface fashioned into a pair of circling snakes. She and the Minos—who appeared to be doing an admirable job of controlling his joy at seeing her—spoke what seemed to be a series of responsive formulas. Then the ceremony ended. The priestesses, as Jason assumed them to be, led the way out, and the prisoners were hustled along in their wake.

  “What was that all about, Perseus?” Jason dared to whisper as they crossed the open corridor.

  “I’m not sure. They were using an old-fashioned form of the Keftiu tongue, different from what the people speak nowadays. But I think the priestesses are taking us before the goddess Rhea for purification. The Minos has to allow it, before he can do whatever it is he plans for us.”