by Dana Fredsti
“Had we offended him,” Hypatia responded, “I’ve no doubt he could have sent a wave the height of the lighthouse over the walls and dumped enough water to turn the city into a giant horse-trough. Or simply have the sea swallow us, like Atlantis. But no, this wave was not even as harsh as the one that struck in our fathers’ day. That one killed thousands and sent the ships in the harbor crashing onto rooftops more than a mile away. By those standards, I’d say the Earth-Shaker wielded his trident most gently this time.
“Still,” she mused, “where did the wave originate?”
Southwestern Flank of the Mediterranean Trench
Approximately 5 Million Years B.C.
Forty-five seconds before the Event
The air was furnace-hot, the baked ground pebbled like the skin of a toad, stretching across a vast, desolate plain hemmed in by high mountains the color of bone and dust. It had endured this way for millions of years, and would remain so for hundreds of thousands more—until that day, still far in the future, when the endlessly patient waters of the Atlantic Ocean finally breached the Strait of Gibraltar, and the parched Mediterranean desert became a sea.
Up on the great heights of the mountains, forests of pine, olive, and juniper flourished. Monkeys, lions, and prehistoric varieties of elephants and rhinoceros thrived there, among a host of other animals. On the roasting abyssal salt plains, however, nothing lived. The only life lay in the briny lakes, rimmed with clusters of pillowy white salt deposits. In those sludgy, brackish waters, shrimp and blackflies swarmed, along with the migratory birds that fed upon them.
The water of one lake, already ferociously hot, began to boil. Along the edges, salt deposits began to crumble, the pieces slowly rising up into the air. A low rumble began, rapidly eclipsed by a high keening shriek. Alarmed, the hungry birds took wing and fled. Then a line of prismatic light erupted out of the water, reaching clear into the sky as far as could be seen, one segment of a jagged loop that stretched away kilometers across the salt flats. Streaming walls of energy raged up into space, as if trying to burn the stars. Then, as sudden as a snuffed candle, the violent cosmic torrent vanished.
The waters of the Mediterranean, towering thousands of feet overhead on every side, came crashing down.
* * *
American Schooner USS Enterprise,
Gulf of Sidra, off the northern coast of Libya
August 1, 1801
Three minutes after the Event
Despite the distant towering curtains of light reaching up into the sky, surrounding them on every side, the crews of the American blockade ship and the Barbary corsair Tripoli could ill-afford to take their attention from the battle at hand.
“Fire at will!” Lt. Sterett bellowed. After a vicious exchange of broadsides and an attempt to break away, the Libyan pirates were attempting to grapple the Enterprise and board her. The American marines opened up with musket fire, picking off many of the would-be boarding party.
A sudden shift in the current caught both the schooner and the lateen-rigged polacca, twisting both vessels with a frightening groan of timbers before slamming them against each other. The impact flung sailors on both sides off the rigging, to fall howling onto an unforgiving deck or into the equally unyielding sea.
Like ghost chains lashing out from the deeps, the jinking waters reined the tide-yoked ships hard to larboard. Decks bucking and cracking, they twisted into a widdershins gyre, regardless of the wasted straining of their desperate steersmen or overtaxed tillers.
With both ships gunwale to gunwale, the cannon-duel gave way to small arms fire and hand-to-hand combat. Scimitars and sabers clashed over the rails. The skirmish raged, close and ferocious, the fighting men of both sides too locked in their own personal life-and-death contests to notice the roaring and rumbling all around them, as if the very pillars of the earth were grinding together. Nor did they realize that the undercurrent had seized them all, propelling the vessels at an increasing velocity through a wide, gyrating belt of roiling foam and spray.
Grasping the fore-rail, Sterett spotted his red-bearded Mussulman opponent, the Tripolitan admiral, Rais Mahomet Rous. The admiral and his officers were staring, not at him, nor at the battle still raging between them, but at the source of the powerful current that was bearing their ships to a shared destination.
A yawning maelstrom, more than a mile across.
Both warcraft suddenly wrenched into another sharp half turn to larboard, and then pitched over into the maw of the immense marine funnel. Beyond any control, the ships spun about and twisted to starboard as they sank aft-first into the grip of the whirlpool. The decks lurched sickeningly, pitching overboard those still wrestling with the enemy. Those who could grasp a mast, or ring-bolt, or catch hold of a bit of railing before tumbling over fought just to hang on—corsair and marine alike. The voracious sea took the rest.
For long, terrible minutes, the mariners clung wherever they could find purchase. One marine’s strength gave out and he slipped away, plunging to his death in the swirling darkness below. Those still clinging for their lives watched in horror as the doomed ships seemed to circumnavigate the surface of the vast funnel, somehow suspended—magically, impossibly—in the slanting wall of preternaturally smooth black water.
During one of those last hopeless orbits, Sterett and Rais Mahomet happened to lock eyes. Even if they could have heard each other over the growing roar, there was nothing more to be said. No apologies, no recrimination, no offers of peace, no plans of escape.
Only their ships spiraling down, down, down.
The Fortress of Marsat al Zaafran
Province of Tripolitania, the Ottoman Empire
March, 1872
Twenty-two minutes after the Event
His Excellency the Governor, Bostancibahizade Mehmed Rashid Pasha, was displeased. To be away from his provincial capital was bothersome at the best of times. To be delayed in the inhospitable bandit country of Syrtis was too much to be asked.
The local fortress added no charm. Dubbing the deteriorating garrison fort “Saffron Harbor” did nothing to change the fact that the entire Gulf of Sidra was a stinking, boggy stretch of unremarkable coastline. He vowed to stay in the bathhouse and smoke his hookah until his carriage was repaired.
The sound of swift, anxious footsteps signaled the swift end of that dream.
“Your Excellency!” his irksome deputy cried. The man was a skinny, easily-excited clerk in a worn black uniform, fez, and wire spectacles. “I’ve been looking for you everywhere. You must come quickly!”
“Sort it out yourself, Ibrahim!” the Pasha growled, refusing to stir his considerable bulk from the tub of scented rosewater. “There is absolutely nothing in this snake-infested camel track worth so much fuss and bother.”
“Forgive me, your Excellency. Of course you are correct, but the most astonishing thing I’ve ever seen has occurred. You’ll surely wish to see it!”
All I want to see is forty lashes on your worthless hide, you dog of a Libyan, the governor thought, idly pulling on his magnificent waxed mustache. “I’m sure I will attend to it in good time. For now, leave me in peace.”
“As you say, your Excellency. Just so.” The vexatious little man bowed, backing out of the sauna room, but then hesitated at the doorway. “Still, if you’ll forgive my saying so, Most Excellent Pasha, I—”
Make that one hundred lashes, the Governor thought.
“Allah kahretsin!” the governor roared. His prattling head on a pike, he swore to himself. The deputy bowed repeatedly, so low that he risked falling into a somersault.
“But your Excellency! The sky above the gulf is afire!” That got the Governor’s attention. “It’s utterly… extraordinary!”
“What do you mean? Are we under attack?” He rose from the tub and snapped his fingers for the bath attendants, who rushed over with towels at once.
“I—I couldn’t say, your Excellency.”
“Never mind. Show me!”
T
he servants made quick to fetch his bathrobe and fez, and then his Excellency stormed off to the ramparts to see for himself, promising that Ibrahim would suffer the most exquisitely excruciating tortures if this turned out to be a false alarm.
* * *
As he had expected, Allah willed the sky above the gulf to be as dreary as ever. The Governor turned on his deputy, only just resisting the urge to personally throw the man off the ramparts. That would be entirely too swift a death for him.
“Well? Where is this bombardment of yours, Ibrahim?”
The gangly deputy gulped and pushed his spectacles back on his nose.
“It does seem to have subsided, Most Excellent Defender of the Faithful. But—Oh! Look there!” He stretched out a bony arm, pointing at the stinking beach below them, where the tide retreated with a lingering hiss, exposing the glistening green kelp-strewn seafloor in its wake. The Governor frowned. Though a far cry from the aerial conflagration he had been promised, something new was happening to the waning sea.
A thick shadow darkened the water on the horizon, stretching across the gulf from end to end. It drew nearer, unhurried and silent, slowly turning from black to a white band as the sea began to hump up like a billowing cloak.
The Governor’s impatience and barely-checked rage drained out of him, leaving his face pale and bloodless, quivering with fear. Mesmerized by the swelling wave rising up higher and higher before them.
There was no escape from the towering mass of water that crashed down upon them. The tsunami tore through the fortress as though it wasn’t there.
* * *
The ancient shard drowned beneath the engulfing maelstrom, generating colossal waves as the rest of the Mediterranean Sea rushed in to fill the vacuum. Rings of tidal waves radiated out in an ever-widening circle south through the Gulf of Sidra, destroying everything in an arc through the north coast of Libya.
The shockwave reached north, striking hard at the coasts along the Ionian Sea, up onto the Adriatic, east Crete, and points beyond. The wave-front coursed through the whole of the Mediterranean within hours to finally crash with full force on the shores of Syria Phoenice, but only the tip of the arc skirted along the Egyptian coast.
23
The Island of Pharos
Alexandria Harbor
1165 Ab urbe condita (412 A.D.)
Morning – Six days after the Event
Hypatia was right. The wave had crashed upon the northernmost reaches of the city, washing across Pharos Island and the base of the great lighthouse, and crashing over the causeway to batter the ships filling the Great Harbor, smashing many to timbers against the rocks and pavement of the Eastern Pier. Still, most of the city’s three hundred thousand inhabitants were spared. The gods had been most kind to Alexandria.
Calix nodded. “I take your point. I suppose we were lucky.” He leaned in and lowered his voice, not wishing the slaves to hear. “Still, just between us, with everything that’s occurred this week, are you not worried it may yet be the end of the world?”
She gave him a sad smile. “I’ve thought the end of the world to be on its way ever since the Christians tore down the Serapeum,” she whispered. “Still,” she said, and her expression brightened, “while there’s life, there’s hope, and we still have work to do. For instance, that shipwreck can tell us how far the northern limit of the Wrath-Fall’s effect extends.”
Calix raised an eyebrow. “You never fail to impress, Mistress of Philosophy. Tell me how.”
She pointed to the sandbar and the dead vessel. They could just make out the ship’s name—the sign of the Dioscuri, the twins Castor and Pollux—carved on the bow.
“See where the barge has been cut in twain? The line of division is not ragged, as it would be if the vessel had broken apart or rammed by a warship. It’s been sliced with a perfectly keen edge.”
Calix nodded, grasping the connection. “Cut by the pillar of fire during the Wrath-Fall…”
“Precisely, and as we know the speed of a bireme and the time of the Wrath-Fall, it’s a matter of checking with the harbormaster to see what hour the Dioscuri weighed anchor, and then making a simple calculation.”
Calix looked over to Aspasius, who was trying to conceal a smile, before turning back to Hypatia and giving her a little bow.
“Even the wrath of the gods cannot escape your insight, my lady.”
* * *
The causeway connecting Pharos to the mainland was seven stadia long, which gave it its name, Heptastadion. After they had consulted with the harbormaster, Onesimus took the reins of their chariot and drove them back across to give their report to the prefect.
The route was not without difficulty. Traffic fared worse than usual, which was considerable on most mornings. Even now, days after the Wrath-Fall and its attendant tidal wave, the clean-up continued along the north of the city. Knots of soldiers directed a host of slaves, working in the streets and on damaged buildings to clean debris and bail water into the gutters.
Working alongside many of the slaves were black-robed, hooded men. This small army of volunteers were the parabolani, the Christian order of monks that constantly tended to the poor and destitute. Hypatia turned her head away, not eager to attract their notice. The monks had a darker side as well.
In the agora—the open marketplace that was the heart of Alexandria—Hypatia was disturbed to see there were far more street preachers than usual calling for repentance. The pagan ones, newly-emboldened, thwarted imperial law to demand that passers-by offer sacrifices to Serapis or Poseidon, while the Jewish street prophets admonished their kindred to make atonement to the Hebrew god. All the while, the various rival sects of Christian evangelists called for all to turn to their man-become-god, the Lord Christ Jesus. Since the Wrath-Fall, the anxious crowds around each street-phophet were larger than usual, and more agitated than ever. At every corner, members of one religious faction quarreled with another.
“Alexandria is always rioting.” The magistrianos shook his head. “Right up to the end of the world.”
When Hypatia and Calix arrived at the prefect’s palace, the guard were just as anxious as the common folk in the street.
For years, the Prefect Orestes had counted the two among his most trusted confidants. They found him in conference with his aides, hunched over the table where a neglected, half-eaten meal sat alongside a large map of the city. Hypatia frowned—she had seen the handsome Roman politician in every sort of occasion, but never had the mantle of rulership hung so heavy on his shoulders.
“I want a full inventory of the granaries and warehouses, and their guard doubled,” he ordered his aides, then looked up at their entrance. A wash of relief momentarily softened the worry on his brow. “My lady. Magistrianos. What news? Are the fishermen truly being eaten by sea monsters?” He smiled, but it faded when he saw the look in their eyes.
“I fear it is no joke, Prefect,” Calix responded.
“We can confirm there was at least one such creature,” Hypatia added. “Its corpse has washed up on Pharos. It is similar in scale to the great reptiles now in the lake, though those appear to be plant-eaters.”
“Well, that’s good news, at least,” he replied. “If we can eat them, the whole city can feast.”
The others chuckled, but only lightly—the risk of starvation was all too real. The prefect dispensed with any further attempts at levity.
“Now, what other news do you have? I’ve dispatched riders to the west and east, and south along the Nile—not one has returned with any reports. Yours is the first, and the most welcome. Tell me, what have you determined about the extent of the wilderness—or rather, this island we find ourselves on?”
Calix stepped back to defer to Hypatia, who gestured for Aspasius to bring their map to the table. He unrolled it and stepped back. The hand-drawn chart displayed the layout of Alexandria, filling a narrow strip of land running southwest to northeast between the marshy Lake Mareotis, and the shore of the Mediterranean. Alexander
the Great himself had laid out the city for defense. Its massive city walls closed off both land approaches and, most pleasing, the city breathed with the cooling ocean breezes, enjoying a moderate climate. The vaguely seahorse-shaped Isle of Pharos, together with the Lochias promontory, enclosed the Great Harbor. Taking a charcoal stylus, Hypatia proceeded to draw a wide oval on the parchment.
“On the whole, everything of our familiar city now lies within a small stretch of land and sea, roughly the shape of an almond, extending one hundred and fifty-eight stadia in total from its southwestern-most end here, a few dozen stadia beyond the western necropolis, to its northeastern-most end here, about two dozen stadia into the Eleusis plain. Laterally, it extends north some thirty-two stadia into the sea, and as far as the shore of Lake Mareotis in the south, no more than perhaps a bowshot or two from the city walls.”
Orestes nodded. “So then, if we go beyond the range of a catapult in any direction…”
“Prefect, beyond that,”—she waved her hand over the map in a broad ellipse—“all we knew is now lost to us.”
Orestes frowned at her choice of words. “I sent our swiftest ship to deliver word to the Emperor and request his aid,” he said. “Are you saying…?” He could not finish the thought aloud.
“Prefect… Orestes—I fear we cannot trust in help from Constantinople—perhaps never again.”
He took the news with stoic resolve, nodding to himself as he mulled over the gravity of their situation. “So then, we are adrift alone in—where are we, exactly?”
“We are indeed an island now,” Hypatia replied, “though surrounded by what, I cannot yet say. I can only observe it is a primitive land of chaos and death, filled with long-vanished behemoths. Perhaps something like the primordial world that first emerged from the primal chaos with the gods.”
“You are saying the world has turned back—reverted into the form it held in the distant past?”
“No, that much we do know,” she said. “Our situation is far more uncanny.”