Prospero's Children (27 page)

“But I thought the Atlanteans worshipped the Unknown God,” said the girl. “I was taught He prohibits sacrifice.”

“No god rules in Atlantis,” said the woman, thinly. “That was always our boast. Now, it is our curse.”

“Who
does
rule here?” asked the girl, sensing, even as she spoke, that she should already know the answer.

The woman looked at her with lifted brows. “From where have you come,” she said, “that you have not heard of the Queen of Queens?”

She blushed, feeling stupid. Of course she had heard of Zohrâne, the hereditary queen: who had not? She was about to say
I have seen her
but she bit back the words, knowing that was impossible. It must have been a picture she was remembering, a picture or a statue, of a woman with a golden face and a stiffened column of hair, throwing up her hand in a gesture of power and rage. The recollection troubled her because she could not pin it down.

“You want to be careful,” the landlady went on. “We have become wary of foreigners. Once,” her tone grew scornful, deriding both herself and her fellow countrymen, “once we welcomed all comers, secure in our inborn superiority. Now, we fear the misbegotten fruit of our loins, our unacknowledged grandchildren and great-grandchildren, mongrels who may return to steal our empire and our Gift. A necessary paranoia, so they claim. But you should be all right. You are too pale to be a half-breed.”

The girl smiled politely, returning to the more important issue. “Why does the queen need sacrifices?”

The woman hesitated. “There is a report that she seeks to rule over Death itself,” she said at last. “Presumably the sacrifices are to draw him hither, so she may assert her authority.”

She will try to open the Gate of Death, had said the Hermit. She wants to pass beyond the world and return yet living, in violation of the Ultimate Law. It must be stopped. If the Gate is forced and the Wall of Being breached, all life could be sucked through. In this cause she will destroy the Lodestone and uproot the earth.
It must be stopped.
Her Task. Desperate and impossible.
You have been chosen. The blood of Atlantis
flows in your veins . . .

When she had finished her meal she left the inn and made her way to the temple.

The city was paved throughout, mostly with the lion-colored stone which evidently predominated in the area, only a few alleyways and sidestreets showing the sallow earth beneath. It’s all golden, she thought, the roads, the houses, the pillared arcades, the dirt underfoot. Even the people. The Atlanteans were tall, neither thin nor fat, their complexions varying between ochre and olive, their hair every shade of dark, from mahogany to the purple-black usually produced by henna. The men were often bare-chested, girdled about the waist with belts, sashes, and chains, their loose trousers tied in at ankle or knee, their short sleeveless jackets made of leather, or knotted thongs, or silk stiffened into rigidity by heavyweight embroidery. The women seemed to favor long trousers rather than dresses and were wrapped in veils so diaphanous as to be almost invisible, tinted to the hue and pattern of flowers, jasmine-pale, iris-streaked, orchid-spotted. They must bathe frequently, she thought: the smell as she passed close to them was of perfume, not sweat. She could feel them staring at her after she had gone by. Foreigners appeared as noticeable here as the deformed. Even the slaves, mainlanders from the conquered kingdoms often generations in servitude, had grown to resemble their masters. There were none of the pigs and goats she had seen rooting in rubbish heaps in Géna or the rats which had teemed in Scyre; instead, cats abounded, many of them yellow as the city, others striped and dappled like their jungle cousins with large ears and elongated faces. Tiny bright-colored birds ventured through windows and pecked at tables for crumbs, and long-legged dogs in jeweled collars followed master or mistress, disdaining to sniff at the roadside flotsam. On the principal streets, sweepers removed the rubbish on a regular basis.

When she left the inn the temple had seemed very near; she could see its gilded dome arching above the surrounding buildings. But gradually she realized this was the effect of its size: from the mountainside it had appeared merely huge but on ground level it was immense, an architectural prodigy which might have been constructed by giants rather than men, its soaring hemisphere polished with sunlight, stabbing the eye with pure flame. The houses in its immediate vicinity looked huddled and shrunken, drawing closer together as if in awe of their overpowering neighbor. She turned off the main thoroughfare and found herself in a maze of narrow streets which evidently constituted a kind of market. Here, the very shops were jostling each other for space; awnings straddled open-fronted stores while more secretive emporia lurked behind curtained doorways and rustling blinds. There was the clinking of coins, the flashfire exchange of rapid bargaining, the leisurely drawl of the skilled, the whisper of furtive deals. Everything edible or wearable, useful or useless seemed to be for sale. Briefly, she forgot her goal and wandered in a trance, bathing her senses in a kaleidoscope of new impressions. A motley of aromas flowed over her: the hot-brown pungency of spices, the flower-and-musk of oils, the sting of vinegar and pickles, the reek of a molten cheese. People sidestepped her, a passing cat looped her leg. And then she was standing still, and Atlantis faded, and the nightmare city returned, its gray towers dwarfing market and main street, the image rushing over her in a vast surge of rumbling, skirling, juddering noise . . . She closed her eyes, and felt the soft touch of the cat against her calf, and heard its mewing voice. When she opened them again, there was the cluttered precinct, and the rickety pattern of awnings, and a woman at a nearby counter was asking her if she was all right. “Yes,” she said, “yes, thank you.” They gave her a drink made from lemons, cool in the heat, and refused any payment. Take care, the woman said, there are pitfalls here for strangers. The girl smiled and moved on.

And then at last she emerged onto the wide promenade circling the temple, and the great dome reared immediately above her, its apex lost behind the arc of its own horizon. It was raised above street level, looking down on the city, ringed by a roofless colonnade whose marble pillars loomed like the trunks of headless trees. Many steps ascended toward it, cloven at intervals by shadowy gullies where dim posterns closed off the netherworld of cells and cellars, chambers and catacombs which lay beneath. People were seated here and there on the steps or strolled in the colonnade, but every entrance was guarded and crossed spears barred unauthorized worshippers from gaining admission. She did not approach any of the doors, walking instead around the outskirts seeking a more unobtrusive means of ingress. At one point an elevated walkway, supported by a row of arches, joined the temple to the upper storey of a neighboring building, probably a stables. She studied it for sometime, absorbing everything in the vicinity. A beggar was sitting under one of the arches, cross-legged, his bowl in front of him. His hair, snarled into elflocks and discolored with the city dust, hung over his face; the same dust adhered in patches to his skin, making his limbs appear piebald. His clothing was brief and ragged. A cracked water-jar stood beside him but he did not touch it, immersed maybe in some drug-soaked dream, or locked in the stasis of despair. Drawing nearer, she saw he was quite young. It might have been fancy but at the sound of her footstep she thought his gaze flicked upward for an instant, and a gleam of alertness scanned her face.

The advent of a vehicle caught her attention: a chariot pulled up beside the adjacent building and an ostler came out to unharness the horse, leading it through the broad entrance. The passenger followed; the charioteer sat down to await his return. They’re going through to the temple, she thought, glancing up at the covered walkway. There were two guards by the stables but they had neither breastplate nor spear, only short swords. One of them had removed his helmet to scratch his head. As she watched, the beggar, apparently aroused by the arrival of the chariot, twitched into action, tottering toward the guards as if on a reflex, his bowl extended and the untouched water-jar dangling from his right hand. One of the men said something contemptuous, the other rattled his discarded helmet in mockery. And then the beggar let fall his bowl and, moving with sudden speed, shook the water-jar so that a small object flew out, hitting the first guard on his bare torso, dropping to scutter across his sandaled foot. He screamed. The other stood just a moment too long with his jaw hanging and helmet in hand; a swift kick caught him in the groin and he doubled over, reeling to avoid the thing on the ground. Then the beggar was through the door and inside the stables. The two guards, one groaning, the other yelling, lurched after him. The passersby, including the charioteer, seemed content to spectate, giving the creature from the jar a wide berth. The girl approached cautiously. It was a scorpion, longer than the span of her hand, its carapace sculpted in bronze, its tail curled into a question mark. Presently, it went one way and she the other, slipping quietly and unremarked into the dimness of the stables.

She ducked into one of the stalls to avoid the ostler, pressing herself against the warm flank of its occupant, who watched her with an incurious eye. When the man had moved on she made her way through a gloom thick with horse-smell and straw-tufts till she came to a wooden stair. At the top, she found the hayloft on her right; on her left, a passage leading to the walkway. She judged the chase must have taken the same route perhaps a minute or two ahead of her; with luck, any guards posted to this particular entrance would have been diverted. The walkway was cool after the stable, sunlight filtering through a latticework of stone to lie like a net along the floor. The door to the temple was open and unmanned. Everything was very quiet. She stepped through, peering from side to side, seeing no one. Where the beggar and his pursuers might have gone she did not know, but it hardly mattered. Inadvertently, he had aided her; now, she had no further interest in him. Her Task preoccupied her to the exclusion of all else. Yet she had no real idea what she was meant to do.

She was standing on a gallery which ran round the entire circumference of the temple under the rim of the dome. Inside as well as out, the enormous vault was overlaid with gold. Indeed, the whole interior seemed to be golden, leafed and gilded, molded and wrought, the marble pillars yellow-veined, the gallery dipped in amber shadow. Below, light was admitted through many tall slender windows draped with sheets of gossamer which glistened with a fugitive sparkle. Wraith-like flames hovered over vessels of oil, blurring the atmosphere with the hint of smoke. There was the scent of lemon and sandalwood and other things she did not recognize, a dark-gold perfume, potent but diffuse. She guessed there must be louvres somewhere round the perimeter of the dome, since the air, though still, was not stifling. She sensed that here in the temple was the nucleus of the city, the pure element of all that was Atlantis, its golden heart not so much a symbol as a raw manifestation of wealth and glory and undisputed dominion. Not a place to worship a deity but a hallow to deify the worshipper. The Unknown God was too far removed, distanced by His very Incognito: here, the Atlantean lords raised themselves in His stead, wielding unearthly powers, striving always for more than their Gift had to give. She felt them doomed, though her fear had neither cause nor shape, yet still she found the temple awesome and beautiful beyond all other works of Man. Even the mad dreams of Zohrâne seemed suddenly to touch something deep within her—the yearning to outreach her grasp, to dare against fate, to break the Laws that cannot be broken. For such is the essence of human nature: from the moment Lucifer rebelled, we have known him for one of us.

She pushed aside her treacherous empathy, moving to the balustrade, looking down into the belly of the chamber. The vast floor stretched away below her, perhaps five hundred feet from wall to wall, its mirror-surface reflecting the gold of the ceiling as in a lake. Engraved on it in lines spider-thin yet very clear was a huge mandala enclosing a rayed star or sun, and within that several hieroglyphs or runes whose meaning she did not understand. At the center stood the altar. It was a piece of plain rock, unadorned, smoothed maybe by the sea, its shape irregular; no doubt it had some significance of which she was unaware. Its top was slightly hollow and on it rested a black globe the size of a serpent’s egg. As her gaze reached it she felt its pull, so strongly that her heart thumped and her breath grew short. And suddenly she realized that the golden temple, even the city itself, was little more than a decorative receptacle for this one deadly thing, a glittering corolla around a seed of infinite power. Even as she stared the force emanating from it seemed to intensify, as though responding to the surge within
her
: the air throbbed with it, and the chamber trembled like a mirage, shivering on the borderline of existence, and only the Stone was real. She groped her way along the gallery until she found a stair, descended in a stumble to ground level. The force compelling her on was so strong she thought she crossed that wide floor in two or three steps. Then the altar was before her, and she had laid her hands on the Lodestone.

It was not a stone, she knew that at once. To call it a stone was merely a title of convenience: it felt and looked a little like stone only because it was harder than hard, heavier than the whole planet, but the heaviness was inside it, not weighing it down but drawing it into itself. It was neither alive nor dead; it had Being without Consciousness, power without purpose. It was a ball of matter so dense there might have been entire worlds crushed within it, and she shuddered at its touch, even as that touch disseminated through her body like the fallout of a shooting star, burning her with a thousand sparks that illumined but did not destroy. Her hands became transparent as the fire in her veins glowed through the filmy layers of her skin. With a fascination beyond horror she saw her bones shining like phosphorus, and the multiple sinews that knotted and bound them rippling like threads of living silk. Then the burning faded, and her hands clouded into normality, and the Lodestone released her, leaving her swaying as if she were faint or drunk. The echo of a door slamming somewhere below barely revived her sense of danger. She half ran, half staggered across the floor to the cloister beneath the gallery and collapsed at the base of a pillar, huddling into the golden shadows.