Shadows on the Aegean (3 page)

Silence yourself! Sibylla hissed. As a member of Clan Olimpi, she would compete for the role of Great Goddess and Phoebus’
wife. While tradition decreed
Hreesos
must be golden haired, his wife need only be Clan Olimpi, religiously trained, and fertile. The prosperity of the land related
directly to the Great Goddess’s fecundity. The queen must conceive within thirty nights of the sacred marriage. Sibylla sighed;
it was too early in the seasons to concern herself. The race was moons away.

Race? Moons? I have a bad feeling about this
.

Arching her back, feeling unused muscles stretch and pull, Sibylla tried to enjoy the restfulness of Caphtor, to ignore the
strange voice that spoke to her in a language she didn’t fully comprehend. On Kallistae, the wind would be whipping around
the palace, the sun not even touching Ileana’s chamber, the
Megaron
, until well after its zenith. Cold, rainy, and noisy, the island shrieked with the winter wind.

Sibylla pitied the Mariners, Aztlan’s navy. Winter, the Season of the Snake, was forbidding on land. How much more terrifying
on a ship? The Mariners sailed from port to port, checking on the various outposts of the empire, trading food for stones—seeking
for certain stones. Sibylla shrugged. Her pity was wasted: each clan had its responsibilities.

Instinctively she touched the clan seal around her neck.

Nice necklace
, the voice said.

The gold seal showed a snake swallowing its tail, signifying her name day, and was inscribed with horns for her clan. It had
hung around her neck since she’d come into adulthood. Each chieftain wore a similar golden seal. The only time they were removed
was during the Council meeting, when the chieftains were stripped and unadorned, representing every man and woman. The meeting
convened every nine years and in the nineteenth year, during the Season of the Bull.

The Season of the Bull? Is that summer? Please, someone tell me where I am…
. The voice trailed off despairingly.

“Help me, Kela,” Sibylla prayed under her breath. Surely she was hearing
skia
talking to each other.

As Kela was the goddess of women, the Apis bull Earthshaker was worshiped only by men. The priests had pyramids on Aztlan
Island and the other four “Nostrils of the Bull” throughout the empire. The peaked Nostrils cast Apis’ hot, sometimes putrid
breath into the air. The priesthood worshiped diligently, for if the Bull’s ire was raised, he was a destroyer. He breathed
fire, melted gold, boiled the springs and rivers, and made the mountains bleed molten rock.

The freshness of the rain-soaked fields recalled Sibylla, and she smiled in anticipation of the year: the nineteenth, the
Megolashana’a
. Her earlier visions of horror had faded. Sibylla could not believe Kela and Apis would seek to destroy their own people!
Surely the Great Goddess was not truly bidding them to leave their homes? Was there another meaning, perhaps? Symbolized by
these dreams?

Her mind felt clearer now, her skin once again familiar. When she was an oracle, the spirit of Kela inhabited her body, speaking
truths, answering questions. Only a small part of her intellect would stay behind, as an anchor for her wandering
psyche
. Extensive training had taught her never to let the silver noose, which linked her traveling spirit and her Kela-inhabited
body together, to stray too far. She could be lost forever then, doomed to wandering as a
skia
.

Sibylla acknowledged, however, that some part of her was missing. The silver noose had come undone, and she feared that part
of her
psyche
was wandering. Something else had come back in place of herself.
Someone
else.

Me!
the voice said.

“My mistress?” someone called, and Sibylla looked up gratefully. The young bride-to-be approached. Sibylla accepted the offering
of corn from the nymph’s outstretched hands.

“You spoke of destruction yesterday,” the girl said.

Sibylla looked away.

“Will my husband be safe?”

The humility of the young woman’s question brought tears to Sibylla’s eyes. The nymph asked not for herself, but for the boy
she loved.
Your vision looks like footage from a
National Geographic
special
, a voice inside her said. Sibylla stiffened, chilled by the voice. The interloper was speaking. Nay, it must be Kela.

“I did not see him in the vision,” Sibylla answered. The girl’s night-dark gaze searched hers, then dropped away. Sibylla
knew her words were false, but what hope to tell a bride she would not live to see her firstborn?

So tell her to go to the other side of the island
, the voice said.
Surely she has relatives there. It won’t hurt them to get away for a while. It might even save their lives
.

Please let this be the Kela speaking to her in a way never before experienced, Sibylla prayed.

Not hardly
, the voice scoffed.
C’mon, this kid deserves a break
.

If I instruct her, demand she move, Sibylla countered, would that not be changing what is decreed to happen? If she loses
her home and fields, what matter is it for her to live?

Within her Sibylla felt a heavy, lost sigh.
We can only try. Those things that cannot be changed are not…
. Sibylla felt the voice retreat, wounded and hurting.

“You have family in Phaistos, nymph?”

“Aye, my mistress.”

“After you are wed, go there.”

The nymph’s eyes grew round. “Phaistos?”

“It is the wish of the Kela.”

Sibylla rested her head on the rock, listening to the sounds of the nymph scampering down the stony path, returning to the
village. The creature inside her smiled.

Way to go, Sibylla
.

N
O ONE SAW
.

They began in the dark depths of the ocean, peaks built by the fury of the earth. An arc of islands swept through the wine-dark
sea, heights of death intermixed with cradles of savage and gentle beauty: Milos, Hydroussa, Tinos, Siros, Myknossos, Delos,
Naxos, Paros, Nios, Folegandros, and the connected islands of Kallistae and Aztlan. Some had spewed their fury before humanity
inhabited their slopes; others would remain silent for centuries more.

As the African and Eurasian tectonic plates slowly nudged each other, ripples and ridges shuddered through the earth, compressing
rock, fueling fire, building tension, creating this volcanic sweep of islands on the plot of earth to someday be called the
Aegean microplate. Massive earthquakes on the ocean floor were felt only as bare tremors in the clear air, thousands of meters
above.

Stealthily the molten core had risen. What had once lain a day’s sail beneath the crust of the earth had crept into four channels
that ran like veins inside the beautiful mountains of the Aztlan empire: Mount Apollo, Mount Krion, Mount Gaia, and Mount
Calliope.

The weakest channel was on Delos, an island of artists. Mount Calliope loomed above them, an inspiration for paintings, for
poetry, for the soul. The artists did not feel the increasing heat beneath their sandals. No animals had yet become victims
of gas poisoning. Thousands lived in Calliope’s shadow, celebrating feasts in its groves, making love in its crevices, giving
strangers directions by its location. They did not know liquid death lurked inside the mountain. Hot, boiling with rage and
rock, creeping through the narrow passageway that led to the throat of the cone.

Thousands of years had passed since the last eruption. A mass of land now resided on the bottom of the purple ocean, testimony
to the earlier wrath of the earth. The mountain had spewed rocks the size of ships for days, raining scalding ash on the round
island. Fire had reached the heavens, and the tales of destruction became part of myth and legend.

Then the mountain had slept. Minutely the cone had risen from the depths of the ocean. Green grass had covered it and birds
had flocked to it, and each year it was bigger and higher, its soil more fertile. A tribe had reclaimed it, growing purple
grapes and flavorful herbs and fig trees, raising their crops and rearing their children, unaware.

No one settled on the peak, for the high places were forbidden by the deity the tribe worshiped. Iavan, the ancient patriarch
of the tribe, told of how the deity had saved his family because of the goodness of his grandfather, Noach. This family, and
the animals they had gathered up, had been spared from the waters that had drowned the earth. Because of this nameless deity’s
rescue, the tribe that sprang from Noach’s loins was ever faithful.

As the cone grew and time passed, the god passed from practice, then memory. Rising from the same stock were others who worshiped
the earth, the sky, and the sea. They identified the island cones as Nostrils of the Bull, whose roars sometimes shook the
earth. In great piety and vanity they tipped the cones with pyramids, their sides emblazoned with precious stones, their interiors
vast caverns where their priesthood lived.

Beneath the floors tiled in gold circles, black stripes, red swirls and squares, the volcano grew. Like the bull god who controlled
it, the mountain’s rage was consuming and unfocused. It waited, the heat that could vaporize a man, building, growing more
intense than any metal worker’s forge, its capacity pulled from below the ocean, where cataclysms were born, in the molten
womb of the earth.

It waited.

THE AZTLAN EMPIRE

I
LEANA LINED HER LIPS CAREFULLY
with the sharp edge of the ocher, then moved the color stick to her nipples, adding a drop of water and painting them, too.
A few good pinches brought them erect. She smiled, pleased.

Her many summers had been good to her. She still had the figure of a nymph, and the legends of her beauty brought sailors
and gifts from around the empire and beyond. Zelos was hers, for a little while longer. Ileana swallowed, a tremor of fear
playing with her brow. At midsummer festival her husband’s son would become the ruler and she would become a widow. Phoebus
had hated her as a boy. Now, at age nineteen, he hated her even more. Ileana had not lived so long and so well that she didn’t
recognize danger. Phoebus would as soon kill her as see her, but Ileana had no intention of stepping down as Queen of Heaven.

There was no doubt she would win the footrace. However, Phoebus would have his satisfaction if she were unable to become pregnant
in the time allotted. She refused to think of the penalty for losing: the Labyrinth.

A piercing shriek came from the corridor, and Ileana patiently finished her makeup. A peacock strode in, screaming, his tail
closed. Ileana turned on her stool, snapping her fingers for a serf to hand her seeds. “Come along, my beauty,” she said,
throwing its food on the painted floor. “Show me how lovely you are.” The peacock ate the seeds and screamed for more. “Not
until you show your colors,” Ileana admonished her pet.

Obligingly the male strutted forward and preened, opening the multicolored wonder of his tail. “Those two and that one,” Ileana
said to the serf. The peacock screamed again, closing the fan of his tail, but the serf was fast and already held three long,
eyed feathers in his hand. Three, a number to honor the Great Goddess. Laughing triumphantly, Ileana turned back to her water
mirror. Deftly the boy tucked the feathers into her crown of corn gold hair.

“The feathers make your eyes as fathomless as Theros Sea,” the boy said.

Admiring her reflection, Ileana leaned back against him, her head against his chest. She feasted on his expression of admiration
reflected in the mirror, then waved him away.

Immediately he bowed, stepping back. She snapped her fingers and two handsome men, long limbed and narrow waisted, opened
her chamber’s doors. With a final tug of her seven-tiered skirt, befitting her role as mother-goddess, Ileana stepped to her
carrying chair. Before she asked, a rhyton was handed to her. It was a slender pointed cup fashioned from mother-of-pearl
and gold, pointed at the end to stay fixed upright in a graceful metal stand or the ground. She snapped her fingers and the
men proceeded slowly so they would not step on the wandering peacocks.