Temple of the Gods (38 page)

Eddie punctured her bubble. ‘Great. We’ve come to the bottom of the Atlantic to look at a building site.’

‘Shut. Up!’

They approached what was left of the Temple of the Gods. Compared to some of the other majestic structures the expedition had unearthed it was not particularly big, an oval perhaps seventy feet across at its longest. Large sections of its walls had toppled outwards, giving the impression that it had exploded from within.

‘So that’s where they kept this sky stone?’ Eddie asked.

‘That’s right,’ said Nina. ‘It’s quite an unusual place, actually. Atlantean temples are usually devoted to a single god, but this was dedicated to . . . well, dozens of them, as far as we can tell. Although now that we know about the sky stone from the rest of the Kallikrates text, there might be an explanation. Nantalas said that it contained the power of the gods – plural. So the Atlanteans made sure to honour them all.’

‘If they knew there was something special about the meteor, enough for ’em to build a temple to put it in, why didn’t they use its power right away?’

Nina looked out at the broken building as they glided past. ‘There could be any number of reasons. They might have been afraid of it; the text said that some of the royal court were opposed to using its power. Or maybe they didn’t originally have all three statues – or anyone who could use them. It was obviously a big thing for Nantalas to be able to channel earth energy, so it could have been as rare an ability then as it is now, even amongst Atlanteans.’

‘Maybe you’re her great-great-great-great-et cetera grand-daughter,’ Eddie suggested.

Nina treated the jokey comment with more seriousness. ‘Maybe. I’m descended from
someone
from Atlantis, so who knows?’

The collapsed temple disappeared from view. Beyond it, something far larger came into sight.

The Temple of Poseidon.

Even after the destruction wrought upon it by the impact of the sunken
Evenor
, it was still an imposing structure. The submersible was approaching its northern end, where Eddie had first entered the temple five years earlier. An enormous wall of dark stone rose out of the sediment, stepped in tiers like a ziggurat near its base before curving smoothly inwards to form a great arched roof.

Nina noticed a sudden tension in her husband at the sight. ‘Hugo?’ she asked quietly. Eddie gave her a silent nod; one of his closest friends had died here. Matt also became uncharacteristically sombre for a moment. Eddie had not been the only one to suffer a loss at Atlantis.

The submersible drew closer. ‘That’s the tunnel,’ said Eddie, pointing at a small hole in the wall. The shaft had been constructed by the Atlanteans as a secret passage leading directly to the altar room.

‘You don’t need to crawl through a little hole to get inside now,’ said Matt as he guided the
Sharkdozer
towards the roof. The wreck of the
Evenor
came into sight, a long white axe that had sliced the four-hundred-foot-long temple in two. Something bright flickered in the gloom atop the rubble. ‘There’s the altar room.’

He brought the sub into a hover near the object, a marker pole covered in reflective material that caught the spotlights. Not far from it was a twisted mass of metal – part of the
Evenor
’s superstructure. The excavated sections of the altar room were visible before it, orichalcum sheets glinting on the walls.

Gypsy
moved ahead of them and came to a stop above the dig site. ‘
Sharkdozer
in position, confirm,’ said Matt over the radio.

‘Read you,
Sharkdozer
,’ Hayter’s crackly voice replied. ‘
Gypsy
also in position.’

‘Roger that.’ Matt turned to Nina and Eddie. ‘This is the boring part, I’m afraid.’

‘That’s okay,’ said Nina. ‘I want to watch the whole thing. You never know what might turn up.’

‘I’ll give it a miss,’ Eddie said. He took a creased paperback thriller from inside his leather jacket and thumbed it open. ‘Been meaning to finish this for ages. I got interrupted by the whole wanted-for-murder business. I’ll just read it while you’re telling Matt how to dig.’

‘I’m not going to do that,’ she assured Matt.

‘Too bloody right you’re not!’ the Australian replied with mock offence as he took the manipulator controls. ‘Okay,
Gypsy
, I’m ready to start.’

The other submersible moved closer, spotlights and cameras panning for a clearer view as Matt began the long and involved task of removing the debris covering the altar room. The first priority was the wreckage from the
Evenor
; even though most of it had already been cut away, it was still a hefty chunk of steel heavier than the
Sharkdozer
could lift using its thrusters alone. It wasn’t until the sub touched down on top of the temple and used its skids to brace itself that the arms could apply enough leverage to start raising the broken section of superstructure.

It took the better part of an hour to get it safely clear. Once it had been dumped in the silt away from the building, work began in earnest. None of the fallen slabs were as heavy as the ship debris, but they were still fairly massive in their own right.

Time passed. Matt took a break to recharge with an energy drink and a sandwich, while Nina forced herself not to tap her fingers impatiently. Eddie smirked at her over the top of his novel, knowing how she was feeling. Then the work continued, the obstructing blocks gradually becoming fewer in number. Until—

‘There!’ said Nina, as Matt hauled one of the remaining slabs out of the way. ‘There it is!’

A golden light reflected back at them from the sheet of precious metal covering the newly revealed wall. It had been damaged in several places, a great jagged rip through one entire section obliterating the text . . . but the crucial part was still more or less intact.

The last inscription. The final written words of the great empire of Atlantis.

‘There, there there
there
!’ Nina jabbed a finger excitedly. ‘Get the camera on it, quick!’

Eddie snapped his book shut. ‘Calm down, love! It’s not going anywhere.’

‘I know, I know. But, well . . . I want to see it!’

‘She was like this the first night I was back home,’ he told Matt. ‘Couldn’t keep her hands off my pants.’

‘
Eddie!
’

‘What you do in private isn’t my business,’ Matt said, amused. ‘But give me a sec here, Nina – I still need to put this stone somewhere.’ He worked the controls, Nina fidgeting beside him. Finally, the block was released. ‘All right, let’s have a dekko.
Gypsy
, you got your cameras switched on?’

‘We never turned them off,’ said Hayter over the radio, sounding almost as enthusiastic as Nina. ‘Nina, we’ve got our translator hooked up to our high-definition camera. It’s got better resolution than the ones on your sub, so we should get our pictures first—’

‘Sorry, Lewis,’ Nina cut in as she opened the laptop containing her own copy of the translation software, ‘but I’m going to be selfish on this one. My primary interest here is the very last piece of text, so I want to work on that straight away. Once we’ve got the pictures, you can record the rest of the inscriptions. Okay?’

‘If you insist,’ came the sour reply.

Matt delicately brought the hulking submersible closer to the wall with careful blips of its thrusters. He stopped when the viewing bubble was about six feet away, the magnifying effect of the thick hemisphere almost making the text readable with the naked eye. But instead, he extended one of the secondary arms until its camera was less than a foot from the metal sheet. ‘You ready, Nina?’

‘Recording,’ she answered. ‘Go ahead.’

Matt slowly panned the arm back and forth over the final section of text. A window on the laptop’s screen displayed the live feed; another, larger window showed the whole inscription building up section by section as the computer automatically matched them together like pieces of a jigsaw puzzle. It wasn’t long before the image was complete, at which point another program began the more complex task of translating the ancient language into English.

‘Okay, Lewis,’ Nina said into a headset, ‘I’ve got what I need. You can move in now.’

The snideness behind Hayter’s simple ‘Thank you’ was clear even through the distortion. Matt backed the
Sharkdozer
away, and
Gypsy
took its place, cameras peering intently at the rest of the ancient record.

‘So, what does it say?’ Eddie asked, leaning across the confined cabin to examine the screen.

‘Give it a chance,’ said Nina. ‘It’s a lot faster than translating by hand, but it’s not
Star Trek
.’ Words were already starting to appear, though: the image-recognition software was picking out familiar patterns. ‘Nantalas gets mentioned several times . . . and so does the sky stone.’

More minutes passed, the gaps in the translation gradually filling in. Some parts remained blank; either the condition of the orichalcum sheet was too poor for the computer to pick out the letters, or the words were simply unknown, having never been found in any previously translated Atlantean texts. But even with gaps, Nina saw a clear narrative taking form.

‘It’s what I thought,’ she said softly. ‘This really is an account of the last days of Atlantis – the last hours, even. Someone was still keeping records right up until it fell into the ocean.’

‘What caused it?’ asked Eddie.

‘From the look of this . . . Nantalas herself. And the sky stone. Listen.’ She began to read the translation, attempting to smooth out the computer’s awkward and over-literal phrasing. ‘“The king and the royal court came to the Temple of the Gods to witness Nantalas bring together all three keys of power and touch them to the sky stone. There was much . . .” This is a bit jumbled – ah, something like “awe and terror as the great stone rose from the ground, shining with a holy light”.’

‘So it’s definitely earth energy, then,’ Eddie mused. ‘I don’t get it. It would have been like having nuclear power back in the Stone Age. How could it be forgotten about for eleven thousand years, apart from when Merlin and King Arthur fluked into using it with Excalibur?’

Nina was reading ahead. ‘I think I know. “Nantalas commanded the stone to rise and fall, using no words but those in her thoughts. She then told the court that she would . . .” I guess in context it would have to be “demonstrate”, “she would demonstrate the power that would crush the enemies of Atlantis. But . . .”’

‘But?’ said Matt after a moment. ‘Come on, Nina, don’t leave us hanging!’

‘It didn’t exactly go as planned,’ she told the two men. ‘The computer couldn’t translate some of the words, but there’s enough to get the gist. Basically, the demonstration blew up in her face.’

‘Literally?’ said Eddie.

‘Pretty much. It says there was lightning, “a storm unmatched in history as Zeus unleashed his fury upon those who had dared to claim the power of the gods as their own”. Huge earthquakes, buildings collapsing – and great waves. Where we are now, the Temple of Poseidon, was right at the heart of the Atlantean capital – and it was directly connected to the Atlantic by canals, so it was essentially at sea level. The text describes huge waves sweeping inshore.’

‘Atlantis sinks beneath the waves,’ said Matt ruefully. ‘Just like the legends always said.’

‘There’s something else, though.’ Nina read on. ‘“The sky stone itself was snatched into the heavens on a thunderbolt, flying to the southeast faster than an arrow.” The southeast . . .’ She tailed off.

‘What are you thinking?’ Eddie asked.

‘When I was in Tokyo, the feeling that I somehow knew the direction something was in . . . it was off to the west. Two hundred and sixty degrees, Takashi said. I wonder . . .’ She opened another application, bringing up a map of the world. ‘Here’s Atlantis,’ she said, pointing at a spot between the coasts of Portugal and Morocco. ‘And here –’ her finger moved across to Japan – ‘is Tokyo. Two hundred and sixty degrees west from there would intersect a line going southeast from Atlantis somewhere around . . .
here
.’

‘Eastern Africa,’ said Matt, looking at the map.

‘That doesn’t narrow things down much,’ Eddie commented. ‘You think the stone ended up there? How?’

‘Some sort of earth energy reaction, perhaps. We already know it could levitate against the planet’s own magnetic fields, so maybe whatever Nantalas did overcharged it, actually repelled it and sent it flying off across half a continent.’ She scrolled down through the translation. ‘Nantalas tried to find it.’

‘How?’

‘She still had the three statues. They gave her a . . . I don’t really want to call it a
vision
, because of the supernatural overtones, but since I had one myself I don’t really know how else to describe it. She told the king it had ended up in . . .’ She read the translated words several times before coming up with a way to express them properly. ‘I think it’s “the Forge of Hephaestus”. Hephaestus was the god of blacksmiths and craftsmen,’ she continued, anticipating the question, ‘and also fire and volcanoes.’