Sunset of the Gods

by Steve White

  “How horrible!” exclaimed Chantal.

  “Exactly. Burning a sacred grove was just one more affront to the gods, added to the Spartans’ throwing the Persian emissaries down a well. And of course the gods wouldn’t be fooled by that trick of having the helots light the fire; they knew who gave the order.” Clearly, Miltiades was more concerned with the trees than with the Argives. “But that was Cleomenes for you. An unscrupulous conniver, to be sure, but our unscrupulous conniver. However, he finally outsmarted himself. He bribed the Oracle of Delphi to pronounce his co-king Demaratus illegitimate, so he could bring in that pliable little rat-fucker Leotychides in Demaratus’ place. When the story came out, Cleomenes was killed—pay no attention to that goat shit about suicide. Too bad. But his successor, who’d married his daughter Gorgo, may have promise. Young fellow named Leonidas.”

  Leonidas, thought Jason, and the familiar tingle took him once again. Leonidas, who ten years from now will lead three hundred Spartans to Thermopylae, where they will leave their bones under a tomb inscribed with “Stranger, go tell the Spartans that we keep the ground they bade us hold,” and sear into the very soul of Western civilization a standard against which every subsequent generation of Western men must measure themselves.

  “And now you must excuse me,” said Miltiades. “I have people to talk to, people to persuade of what we must do when—not if—the Persians come. And the debate has already begun in the Assembly.” Landry restrained himself with an effort as they said their farewells. He would, Jason suspected, have sold his soul for the opportunity to observe the Assembly, but they all knew it was out of the question for resident foreigners like themselves.

  As Miltiades receded into the Agora crowd, Mondrago reappeared. “I followed that man as ordered, sir,” he reported crisply. “He went back in the direction of the Acropolis, and through the gate in that old wall at the base—but not up the ramp to the summit. Instead, he turned left when nobody was looking and skirted the side of the hill—pretty rough footing, I can tell you. He scrambled partway up the side, past some really old-looking shrines or whatever.”

  “The sides of the hill,” Landry interjected, “especially the northern side, were riddled with tiny shrines, some of them of Bronze Age vintage, in Classical times. In fact, come to think of it, there was a shrine to Pan in a grotto there. Although,” he continued, sounding puzzled, “it’s always been believed that that shrine was established after the Battle of Marathon.”

  “Well,” Mondrago resumed, clearly uninterested, “he vanished into one of those shrines. I expected him to reappear soon—it seemed barely large enough for him to take a leak in! But he never came back out. I thought I ought to get back here and report.”

  “You did right.” Jason turned to Landry and Chantal. “You two get back to our rented house. Alexandre and I are going to look into this.”

  CHAPTER NINE

  It was late afternoon when Jason and Modrago passed through the gate at the base of the Acropolis ramp, and there was almost no one about. So they turned unnoticed to the left and began to scramble along the steep, craggy northern side of the Acropolis.

  Looming above them to the right were the walls that surrounded the summit. Below to the left spread the sea of small, tile-roofed buildings and winding alleys that was Athens. They had eyes for neither, for it was all they could do to keep their footing on the crumbling ancient pathways that clung to the almost cliff-like face.

  Here and there, they passed the mouths of shallow caves holding the worn-down remnants of shrines carved into the hill in ages past, often holding barely recognizable statues which must surely predate written history.

  Jason knew full well that humans were quite capable of imagining gods for themselves without the help of the Teloi—the entire religious history of humanity outside the Indo-European zone bore witness to that. So he didn’t know how many of these Bronze Age sculptures represented the alien “gods” and how many reflected images that had arisen from the subsoil of the human population’s own psyche. All he knew was that these shrines, sacred to the forgotten deities of a forgotten people, belonged to a different world from the bustling city below or the self-conscious monuments above. Child of a raw new world, he had always found Old Earth’s accumulated layers of ancientness oppressive—almost sinister. Now he had passed into a realm of ancientness beyond ancientness, and the tininess of his own lifespan shook him.

  “This is the one,” he heard Mondrago say.

  It was much like the others, little more than a rough indentation in the hillside. Inside and to the left was one of the crude sculptures, in a roughly hewn-out niche with an opening to the sky. It got no direct sunlight, here on the north side of the Acropolis, but there was enough illumination to make out the statue’s outlines. With a little imagination, it was possible to see a goat-legged man.

  “He’s gone,” said Mondrago.

  “Gone from where?” Jason demanded irritably, waving his hand at the little cavern, which hardly deserved the name; it was barely deep enough for a man to stand up inside. “Are you sure this is the right shrine?”

  “Of course I’m sure!”

  “But he could barely have squeezed in here, much less remained for a long time.”

  “I tell you, this is where I left him!” Mondrago angrily slammed the rocky rear wall of the cavern with his fist for emphasis.

  With a very faint humming sound, a segment of the rough stone surface, seemingly indistinguishable from the rest, slowly swung inward as though on hinges.

  For a moment the two men simply stared at each other, speechless in the face of the impossibly out-of-place.

  “I must have hit exactly the right spot,” Mondrago finally said, in an uncharacteristically small voice.

  Jason shook his head slowly. No one in the twenty-fourth century had any inkling of anything like this under the Acropolis. “This has to be the work of the Teloi.”

  “Why? Chantal said she saw high-tech equipment on a human.”

  “I know what Chantal said. But she had to be mistaken. The Authority doesn’t allow it. Ever.”

  Mondrago’s brown face screwed itself into a look of intense concentration. “Look, ours is the only expedition that’s ever been sent to this era, right? So if there are other time travelers around here, they must have come from our future.”

  Jason shook his head. “The Authority has a fixed policy against sending multiple expeditions to the same time and place, where they could run into each other. God knows what paradoxes that could lead to!”

  “But you told us—”

  “—That there are no paradoxes. Right. But I also told you that we don’t go out of our way to invite paradoxes, because the harder we push, the harder reality is apt to push back—maybe so hard as to be lethal.”

  “Yes, I know, that’s another fixed policy. But think about it: maybe sometime in our future, the Authority’s policies will change. Maybe the Authority itself will change . . . or even cease to exist.”

  Jason was silent. This had of course been considered, for it was obviously not impossible that it could happen in the unforeseeable scope of the twenty-fourth century’s future. But while no one had ever denied the possibility, no one ever seemed to think about it very much either. Its implications didn’t bear thinking about; the mind reeled from the potential consequences of unregulated laissez-faire time travel. And as more and more expeditions had returned from the past and reported no indication of other time travellers from further in the future, the thought had receded to the back of people’s minds. Everyone had settled into the comfortable assumption that, for whatever reason, the restrictions imposed by the Temporal Regulatory Authority and the Temporal Precautionary Act under which it operated must be forever immutable.

  “Anyway,” said Mondrago, interrupting his thoughts, “why are we standing here speculating? Let’s investigate this.”

  Jason eyed the opening dubiously. “We’re unarmed.”

  “No, we’re not.�
� Mondrago lifted his himation, which he was wearing hanging from his left shoulder and draped around despite the late-July heat, and the chiton under it. He had contrived a heavy cloth sheath with leather strings, by which his short Spanish falcata was strapped tightly to his left thigh.

  Jason frowned. Going armed was not customary in Athens, and the sword would have taken some explaining if anyone had spotted it. But this was no time to raise the issue. He peered through the doorway, which admitted enough light to reveal a flight of shallow steps carved in the stone, leading downward into the gloom.

  “We’ll see how far we can get before the light gives out,” said Jason. As they passed through the doorway, he looked for whatever machinery had opened it, but it was concealed beyond his ability to find it in the dimness.

  They descended the steps, and as their eyes accustomed themselves, they saw they were in what appeared to be a small, natural cave from whose opposite side a tunnel had been dug. At the tunnel’s far end was a faint glow.

  “My God,” whispered Mondrago. “How far under the Acropolis does this extend?”

  “Shhh!” Jason motioned him to silence. Straining their ears, they detected a murmur of voices from the tunnel.

  Without waiting for orders, Mondrago drew his sword.

  They advanced into the tunnel, in which Mondrago could just barely stand up straight and Jason had to stoop slightly. The sides were too smooth and even to be entirely the work of nature. But it was crude excavation, and Jason began to think that humans of the Bronze Age or earlier were responsible for the basic work, to which the Teloi had later added high-tech touches like the door.

  The glow grew brighter as they approached, and they could smell the aroma of burning oil lamps. The sound resolved itself into voices joined in a kind of low chant—a dark, weird, unmelodious drone that was somehow repellent. Jason was wondering if it was bringing to the surface of his consciousness certain memories from the Bronze Age that he had no desire to recall.

  Nearing the tunnel’s end, they flattened themselves against opposite walls in shadow and cautiously peered through the opening. In the light of the lamps they saw a large, roughly circular cavern, clearly of natural origin but shaped by human tools as the tunnel had been shaped. Its floor had been flattened and smoothed, and it was crowded with figures in nondescript local clothes, who were producing the chanting. Those people—they were humans—were arrayed in a half-circle, focused on an idol on a rough dais toward the rear of the cavern and somewhat to the left. It was a crude idol similar to the one in the outside shrine, but in better condition as consequence of being sheltered, and therefore more readily recognizable, even in the dim flickering lamplight, as representing the Pan of mythology.

  But Jason’s attention was riveted on the tall man standing behind the idol—the man they had seen in the Agora. He stood with arms folded, not joining in the chanting but surveying the chanters. His eyes looked down on them with a cold remoteness reflected in the set of his thin lips. It was an expression too far removed from the merely human to be arrogant. He did not sneer, any more than a man sneers at dogs.

  He’s definitely no Teloi, thought Jason, but he could scarcely seem any less human if he was one.

  Abruptly, the man unfolded his arms and spread them wide. The chant instantly ceased, leaving a palpably expectant hush.

  Then the man spoke. His voice was a rich, deep baritone. But there was more to it than that. Below the level of audibility there was something that compelled one to listen to it, to the exclusion of every other sound, and to believe what it said in defiance of all critical faculties. Jason wondered if certain otherwise inexplicable historical figures as disparate as Joan of Arc and Adolph Hitler had possessed the same quality.

  “Rejoice!” he said. “The time is at hand—the time you have been promised. And this time was chosen for a reason. Your god knew that this would be the time when your city would stand in its greatest danger. Even now, the barbarians close in on Athens! Everyone knows it! Nothing your leaders can do will save you from death, your sons from being gelded, your daughters from being raped, and all your children from being enslaved and scattered like dust among the rabble of slaves all across the vastness of Persia. And after another generation, no one will remember that the Athenians ever existed!”

  A low moan of utter desolation filled the cavern.

  “But your god will save Athens!” The extraordinary voice rose like a clarion. “Your devotion is enough to cause him to withhold his righteous anger against this city for its failure to worship him. He will cause the barbarians to go mad with fear, as he has the power to do, and they will flee, howling, to their ships!”

  A rapturous sound arose from the worshipers.

  “Afterwards, Athens will erect a proper shrine out there on the north slope where our poor shrine now is, and offer sacrifice to him every year. But,” he continued, and his voice dropped, “no one must ever know of the secret doorway to this, the god’s true shrine. For you and your successors will continue as you always have to be the custodians of his innermost mysteries. And every few generations, at the prophesied times, the god’s promise to you will be kept, as it has been before.”

  The air of the cavern was now thick with breathless anticipation.

  “Such a time is now come, as was foretold to your ancestors. I and my companions are only the heralds. Now there comes among you . . . the Great God Pan!”

  Without warning, some well-concealed lighting fixture in the wall behind the idol—and hence at about ten o’clock, from Jason’s perspective—activated, and a harsh glare flooded the cavern. The worshipers’ eyes, which had been focused on the idol, were dazzled. But Jason’s, viewing it from an angle, were not. So he was able to discern, in the glare, the idol sinking into the floor with a practically inaudible hum, leaving a hatchway through which a living being emerged—a being at which Jason’s mind reeled. But he didn’t doubt his sanity, for it was inarguably the figure he had briefly glimpsed on the slopes of Mount Aigaleos.

  The artificial light—supernatural to the worshippers in the cavern—faded to a relatively dim glow. In that glow stood revealed an outrage against nature, with the legs of a goat and the upper body of a brown-skinned, hirsute, muscular man—very definitely a man, for it was grotesquely male, almost ridiculously so. The head was that of a man—broad, snub-nosed, full-lipped, with thick, curly hair and beard of a dark reddish brown. From amid that hair grew a pair of horns.

  An ecstatic, almost orgasmic moan gusted from the worshipers.

  The tall man from the Agora turned toward the apparition with the air of a magician who had produced a rabbit from a hat. The motion caused him to face the tunnel opening.

  It belatedly occurred to Jason that the opening where he and Mondrago had crouched in shadows was no longer shadowed.

  The classically handsome face of the speaker contorted into a mask of rage. “Intruders!” he bellowed. “Seize them!”

  “Run!” Jason yelled to Mondrago as the worshipers began to emerge from shock. They ran back along the tunnel, as fast as its cramped confines permitted.

  That slight head start enabled them to reach the steps ahead of their frantic pursuers—who then caught up as they struggled up the steps. Jason felt his legs grappled from behind and below. He wrenched one leg free and kicked backwards, feeling facial bone and cartilage crunch under his hard-driven heel. Momentarily free, he ascended the rest of the way to the area just inside the tantalizingly open doorway, where there was more room. Mondrago was already there. Jason saw him spring backwards after delivering a slicing sideways lunge with his Spanish sword that ripped through a pursuer’s throat and sent him silently to the floor, his head flopping loosely on a neck that had been severed to the spinal column. Jason recognized the Afghan fighting technique, but he had only a split second to admire Mondrago’s mastery of it before a crush of bodies from behind bore him to the floor and a shattering impact to his head caused the universe to explode into a shower of star
s and then go dark.

  CHAPTER TEN

  Jason awoke to a nauseatingly painful headache. He didn’t want to open his eyes, but to fail to do so was out of the question. He parted his eyelids very cautiously.

  The light sent fresh pain stabbing through his head, but it was not quite as bad as he had feared—he could sense that it was dim interior lighting. Lying on his back as he was, all he could make out was a completely nondescript ceiling. He slowly turned his head to the left.

  He found himself looking into a pair of brown eyes, somehow like the eyes of an animal, but not quite, for they held something that no animal would ever know. Those eyes looked out at him from under bushy brows of the same dark russet color as the curly hair and beard that framed a face whose expression he could not interpret. The head lowered to look more closely at him, a motion which caused the horns to dip.

  Unconsciousness mercifully took him again.

  When he awoke again his head was clear. Another difference was that he was sitting up, in a chair to which he was tied. One of the first things he noticed in the light of the oil lamps as his eyes darted around the small, windowless room was that Mondrago was similarly seated and bound to his right, although he was only just stirring from unconsciousness. He also saw a man in local garb walking out the door, holding a hypospray injector by which he and Mondrago had presumably been awakened.

  But mostly he noticed that now he was looking into a human face. Human . . . but inhumanly perfect.

  It was the man they had seen in the Agora and in the inexplicable cavern under the Acropolis. Now he sat at his ease in a chair of local manufacture. His wavy hair was an unmistakable shade: a unique kind of blond-black, like an alloy of gold and iron. His eyes were large and luminous, the color of amber. His lips were full without being thick. There was no indentation between his brow and the bridge of his ruler-straight nose.