Taliesin

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

The first tremors struck kellios just before sunrise. Charis had awakened in the dead of night, feeling the sultry, stifling air thicken to a suifocating blanket. When she could no longer breathe, she rose and went to her balcony to stand before the softly shimmering city. Oceanus rolled restlessly in her bed; a smattering of stars shone red in the night-gray sky, and Charis knew that the end had come.

She accepted this with the icy calm of the bull pit and looked her last upon the sleeping city.

From out of the mountains far away she heard the deep, deep rumbling of summer thunder. So it begins, she thought. Dream on, Atlantis; the day of your death is upon you. Farewell.

She turned away as the rumble became a vibration, slight, insignificant. Dogs in the city began whining and howling. They knew. Soon everyone would know.

She dressed in the clothes she had chosen for this day-a simple, sturdy linen tunic with her wide leather Belt and sandals from the bullring. With practiced fingers she braided her hair and bound it in the white leather thong, put her favorite golden chain around her neck, and walked quickly from her room to sound the alarm-a Bell she had had installed in the center of the portico where it could be heard throughout the palace. With the last peals quivering on the air, Charis hurried on to Annubi’s chambers.

She pushed open the door without knocking arid stepped inside. Annubi was within, sitting at his small table, the Lia Fail before him in its gopherwood box, his eyes red-rimmed and tired. “It is begun,” Charis told him.

He nodded and closed his eyes “Yes,” he whispered.

“Then gather your things and come with me to the harbor. We will wait for Belyn there.”

“Belyn will not come,” said Annubi. “I will stay here.”

“No, I want you with me.” The authority in her voice could not be argued with. Annubi shrugged and rose to his feet, hauling up a cloth-wrapped bundle. He thrust the Lia Fail into the bundle, gazed around the room one last time, and stepped toward the door.

The vibration had ceased, but the air still hung heavy and was now tinged with a sharp, metallic smell. The wailing of the dogs echoed through the palace like eerie music.

In the main corridor they met Lile, shaken and nervous, cradling a drowsy Morgian in her arms and holding tight to her courage. She rushed to meet Charis and, taking her hand, asked, “Is it time?”

“Yes,” replied Charis. “Where is my father?”

“Why, asleep in his bed.”

“Wake him and get on with your duties.”

Lile hesitated. “Give roe the child,” Charis told her, lifting Morgian from her arms. “Go now. And hurry.”

Lile fled back through the corridor. “Take Morgian,” Charis told Annubi, handing him the little girl. The seer recoiled with distaste but accepted the child, who began crying after her mother. “Wait with the wagons,” Charis instructed. Annubi shambled out into the trembling night.

Charis saw to each of the arrangements she had made, moving from one task to the next with cold efficiency. The last weeks had been physically and emotionally exhausting- amassing a small mountain of supplies and tools and packing it all, sealing what she could against seawater; rehearsing the plans she and Lile had made for evacuation with scores of unwilling, often contemptuous, royal functionaries; selling off palace treasures for ready gold and silver; buying and outfitting a fleet of fishing boats to carry people and cargo to deeper waters should need arise; supervising the loading of wagon after wagon with the raw materials for survival-a monumental labor, a tapping of deep, unknown reserves of energy, tact, and will. Now that the final dread moment had come, she could be calm. The world might well crumble around her, but the end would not see her rushing around in undignified panic. She woke those of her overseers still asleep and set them about their prearranged tasks. “Do not stop to think,” she told the fearful. “Do exactly what we have planned and do it quickly.”

In this way, when the first tremors shook the palace hours later, loosing a rain of roof tiles that clattered noisily down in the courtyard, the wagons were already assembled in ranks-ten rows, four abreast-passengers and drivers waiting. Horses reared, their eyes rolling with wild fright in the torchlight. Their handlers leapt forward to drag them down, blindfolding the animals with strips of cloth.

Charis stood on the steps, hands on her hips. “What can be keeping Lile? Must I do it all myself?”

“Princess Charis,” came a voice nearby, “we should take the horses out. If the gates collapsed”

“I know, I know! We are waiting for the king. Go back to your place.”

The man disappeared, and Charis stomped back into the palace to find Lile and Avallach. The second quake struck as she hurried through the long gallery to the king’s chamber. The stone flagging trembled beneath her feet and she heard a distant grinding sound-as if someone were crushing grain between two tremendous querns.

She burst through the door of her father’s room to find Avallach fully dressed and sitting in a chair, Lile at his feet, begging him to get up and come with her. He turned his head as she entered. Ignoring Lile, Charis said, “Father, it is time to go. Everyone is waiting for you to lead them.”

The king shook his head. “I must stay here. My place is here.”

“Your place is with your people.”

“Take Lile and the others. Leave me.”

“We will not go without you, Father,” she said firmly.

“You must go or you will die.”

“Then we will die!” she snapped. “But we will not go without you.”

Avallach rose slowly to his feet; Lile handed him his crutch and led him to the carriage where Annubi and Morgian already waited. Lile and Avallach climbed in and Charis signaled the driver to leave. As soon as the king’s carriage cleared the gate, the other wagons rolled ahead, passing one by one through the outer gates as the ground trembled uneasily beneath the wheels.

Charis waited until the last wagon had cleared the gate and then mounted her horse, pausing in the darkness to look one last time at her ancestral home before leaving it forever. The wagons reached Kellios quickly but found the streets choked with people who had fled their homes and now rushed about in stark panic as one tremor after another shook the ground.

The sound of their wailing was deafening. Charis rode forth, slashing her way through the tumult with her reins, forcing a way through for the wagons to follow. She led her entourage to the harbor and out onto the stone quay, where they stopped to await the ships all desperately hoped would come.

They waited and the sky lightened to a ghastly, sulfurous dawn. From the temple district came the mournful lowing of the bulls. A pall of dust hung over the city like a fog, motionless in the dead air. Annubi strode up and down the quay along the row upon row of wagons. At last he came to stand beside Charis. “It seems to be abating,” he said. “The tremors are losing strength and frequency.”

Charis looked down at his face, pale in the earthly light. “Then we may still have time,” she said.

With the sunrise the tremors stopped and the frightened populace promptly forgot their fear and began going about their normal activities. Those waiting on the quay-nearly five hundred people altogether, the entire population of the palace: masons, artists, carpenters, farmers and herders, stewards and servants and palace functionaries of various types, along with their families, all of whom Charis had promised places in the boats-grew restless as they gawked around at a world that now appeared as solid and permanent as ever.

Charis remained firmly resolved, and as the early hours of the day passed she kept everyone busy transferring the cargo from the wagons to the fishing boats. The sun rose into a stark sky where it lingered interminably, pouring its white heat onto the baking earth Below; and as the burning disk began its downward slide toward the sea, the last of the cargo was secured and still there was no sign of the rescue ships.

The city-dwellers scoffed at the crowd on the quay, taunting, laughing outright, enjoying the spectacle. In the harbor, meanwhile, boats came and went as usual and Kellios itself behaved as if what had taken place only hours before were nothing out of the ordinary.

It was not until the shadows stretched long on the pier that Lile came to Charis and said, “The people are tired, Charis. Perhaps we should go back.”

“No,” Charis told her. “I am tired too, but we cannot go back.”

“We could leave the boats, and if”

Charis turned on her. “Go back to the palace, Lile, and you go to your tomb! There is nothing there but death.”

Lile retreated to keep uneasy vigil with the others, and the long afternoon progressed without event. They ate a simple meal and listened to the nervous wash of the sea back and forth among the footings of the pier as the stifling dusk gathered over the bay, deepening rapidly to night.

And there on the quay, the air thick, oppressive, clinging, they were waiting when they saw the sky suddenly torn with streaking fire as burning stars tumbled earthward, piercing the unnatural stillness with the terrible shriek of their passing, smiting restless Oceanus.

The blazing starfall continued, throwing pillars of writhing steam high into the sky. People from the city poured onto the wharf to gape at the sight. No one laughed now.

From out of the mountains far away came the sound of a mighty and ominous rumble, and the crowd turned to stare in horror at burning stars striking through the heat haze, smashing to earth in a dazzling and deadly rain. Curtained by falling fire, the people of Kellios fled to the sea, swarming the quayside in chaos, fighting one another for places in the small fishing boats that now filled the harbor, bobbing in the uncertain swell and streaming blindly out into the night-dark sea.

“The boats are not coming,” cried someone from one of the wagons. “We have to get away.”

“Silence!” Charis snapped. “We wait.”

“We’re going to die!” someone else whined.

“Then we die like human beings, not fear-crazed animals!”

They waited. Dank, steamy vapors wafted in off the sea, which heaved with an oily swell. Kellios shuddered with the horrid rumbling, shaking the buildings on their foundations, toppling columns from their bases. Many, fearing that the quay would give way, ran screaming back into the city, trampling those who could not avoid them.

By sheer force of her will, Charis kept order among her people, moving amongst them, exhorting them to courage as she had so many times with her dancers in the bullring. An-nubi found her pacing the quay, shouting down the fear mounting around her.

“If the ships do not come soon…”He paused.

“Yes?”

“We may have to go out to meet them.”

“No,” said Charis firmly. “We will wait here for them.” She began pacing again.

Annubi fell into step beside her. “We have time yet, Charis. The boats are ready.”

“Belyn will come,” she said stubbornly.

“I do not doubt it. But he may not be able to reach us.” He lifted a hand into the dead air. “There is no wind for the sails. The ships are floundering tonight.”

Charis turned and peered into the darkness of the harbor and the jostling boats amassed there. “Perhaps you are right,” she relented at last. “We have come this far; we can go farther if need be.”

She turned and began shouting orders. The boats, ninety in all, had been lashed together in threes-two bearing cargo on either side of a passenger vessel. Under the direction of Charis’ overseers the people dispersed among them. And one by one, as each passenger boat was loaded, they struggled into the harbor.

From out in the bay, the people looked back. They saw the sickly sky suddenly brighten in the west with a great light that flashed first yellow and then bloodred.

Silence descended over the land. The sea calmed.

Those in the boats held their breath, gripping the gunwales with bloodless hands.

The sound was felt first and heard afterward: the tremendous, shattering, shocking growl from the churning deep. The eastern sky flashed its strange lightning again as the hills began to buckle and quake. Kellios swayed precariously. Charis looked to the palace hill and saw flames flickering among the toppling walls. And over all was the dreadful, hateful sound.

In unthinking desperation, people threw themselves into the harbor to flounder and drown in their panic. Mothers waded into the sea holding their babes aloft. Terrified horses, loosed from their harnesses, careened along the shuddering beach.

The ground lost all solidity. Hills slid down into their valleys, met and melted together. Trees rippled and spun, their roots groaning and popping as the soil beneath them flowed away like water. Houses swayed and crashed into fluid streets, scattering flames and dust. The cries of those trapped on the shifting land assaulted the dusty air like the screams of frightened birds. The sea bubbled and churned as her bed rocked beneath her.

The sky convulsed and spewed fire upon the city. Brimstone, sizzling and stinking, streaked through the tortured air in flaming chunks, plowing furrows in the hills, pelting down into the heaving wreckage, destroying the temple in plumes of gray smoke and white fire. Stone burned; once-bright or-ichalcum rooftops melted and ran. Above the temple, soot-filled smoke rose thick in the air, bearing the stench of burning fat and flesh.

The whole countryside was soon engulfed in flame. Fire raked the hillsides; smoke billowed up and up to flatten and spread like an enormous hand on the upper wind, blotting out the new-risen moon.

The boats lurched in the troubled water as the stone quay collapsed and slid into the water, dragging screaming thousands with it. Charis watched it all with cold and ruthless objectivity, feeling nothing.

The destruction continued through the night as the boats bobbed and drifted in the harbor. The ghostly moon shone darkly over the bay, and vainly the survivors scanned the horizon for any sign of the rescuing ships. Charis watched the faces of those around her and saw grim hope dissolving slowly into despair as time dragged on. “They will come,” she whispered to herself, knowing that as the boats drifted further and further away from land, their chances of survival decreased. “They will find us.”

Near midnight Charis forced herself to swallow a mouthful of food and a little water. She slept and awakened at dawn to see the doomed land thrashing in its death throes… and still Belyn did not appear with die captured ships.

Atlantis writhed and heaved; the mountains sighed and shook themselves out like folds in clothing; the water crashed on the trembling shore; Kellios burned, and south, along the coast, the smoke from other cities ascended on high, darkening the morning sky to an unnatural twilight. All the while the stars struck down through the gloom, bursting on the ruined land and plunging into the water.

Slowly, terribly, remorselessly, on and on it went.

Near midday, though the sky was dark as deepest night, the iron-dark clouds over the land flashed orange and red.

The air shivered and a searing wind flattened the waves as the sound reached them a moment later: an explosion so enormous that the sea stood up in sharp knifeblade waves and the concussion reached them first as a keening howl-which was the pressure wave ripping rocks and trees from the ground- and then as a deafening, sense-numbing roar.

Atlas itself had exploded in a volcanic seizure which split the mighty mountain from its snow-capped crown to its deep granite roots, hurling the pulverized mass into the tortured air. But before the debris could begin its freefall descent, another eruption gouged the middle from the mountain, gutting it in a fiery violet flash, spewing cinder and smoke and fire and molten stone high, high into the atmosphere. In the blink of an eye Atlas became a turbulent column of fire-streaked gas and smoke.

Battered and deafened by the horrendous blast, the people in the boats clung helplessly to one another-some moaning incoherently, others mute, all stunned and bewildered as whole mountain ranges crumbled and sank before their eyes.

The sea, choppy and confused, now boiled as the flaming rock and mud struck its littered surface. One boat, near Charis, was hit by a smoldering chunk of magma and sank instantly, dragging the two other boats down with it. Water cascaded over the nearby boats in a streaming spray.

Charis caught a movement out of the corner of her eye and turned her head toward land just in time to see the tidal wave cast up by the explosion, rushing at them with stupefying speed.

The people sat paralyzed as the wall of water swept nearer; there was no time to scream or look away. Charis felt the boat tilt up beneath her and clawed at one of the thick cargo ropes as the wave slammed into the boat, lifting it high and rolling it over in a single sweeping motion.

Sky and sea changed places. All was wet, choking darkness. Charis’ hands were ripped from the rope and she was slammed against the gunwale. She would have been thrown from the boat but for the water cascading over her, pressing her down with crushing force.

It happened in an instant. The boats rolled, righted, and the tidal wave rushed on, leaving the survivors half-drowned and gasping for breath. Charis dragged herself upright coughing and sputtering, regurgitating bitter brine; she shook the stinging water from her eyes. The other boats spun in the swell, some of them listing heavily, full of water, and Charis saw that there were fewer now than there had been moments before.

The sky was a gruesome gray-green soup of cloud and smoke, tinged with angry red streaks above the earth where the disemboweled remains of Atlantis trembled and quaked, her once-fair body broken and sundered by hideous paroxysms. The people looked on dumbly, mouths slack, eyes dead with shock.

The boats drifted. Time hung suspended between day and night in a hideous twilight, volcanic steam and smoke steadily clotting the sky, and the dire sounds of fatal convulsions still rumbling across the water. Oceanus grew gradually more calm until the only sound heard was the gentle slap of water and the occasional chunk of floating debris nudging the sides of the boats.

Charis, raising her head now and then, continued to scan the far horizon. But as the numbing hours passed, even her steadfast spirits began to flag and she made her reconnaissance less frequently. The day passed, to be followed by a long, wearying, fitful night in which sleep came as a blessed refuge, too brief by far. The survivors-less than three hundred remaining-huddled in the drifting boats and gazed at their tortured land, trembling beneath its torment.

Dawn arrived with no sunrise, just a minute lightening of the slate-dark heavens, and another interminable day began. The boats drifted; the remnant waited. Charis wondered whether it would not have been better simply to stay in the palace and let the walls fall in upon her, upon them all.

It was Annubi who saw the sail first. He was in the boat next to the one Charis was in, and the two had drifted close. “Charis,” he said softly. She raised her head from its rest on her folded arms. “Charis, look to the north and tell me what you see.”

She looked long and then stood. “Is it a sail? A ship? Annubi, is it?”

They watched, squinting hard at the tiny square on the horizon, dark-hued in the gloom, the ship carrying it still too far away to be recognized. The sail drew slowly closer. Soon others saw it too, raising a clamor in the surrounding boats, some waving articles of clothing to draw the ship to them.

“There is only one,” Charis called to Annubi when the ship could at last be seen. “I see only one! Where are the others? There must be more.”

“Only the one,” affirmed Annubi. “And it is not large.”

“It is coming this way!” shouted someone across the water.

The ship had adjusted its course and was now making for the flotilla of half-swamped boats. The survivors watched as it plowed toward them and their elation changed gradually to alarm, for the dark ship gave no signal of recognition, nor did it show any sign of slowing in the water but drove ahead, its great sail bulging full.

“They do not see us!” cried one of the survivors. The ship bore down, its sharp prow slicing the gray wash. The cry was repeated across the water. The ship was close now, close enough to see individuals standing on the deck, watching them. The survivors called out, raising their voices hysterically.

Something is wrong, Charis thought and realized in the same instant what it was: Seithenin!

The ship closed on the first of the small boats even as the oarsmen struggled at the oars to propel it from the path of the oncoming ship. The boat was struck amidship with a resounding crack. It bounced in the water, splintered, and split, spilling passengers and cargo into the sea. A second boat managed to slide away from the punishing prow; another was saved when one of the oarsmen lifted his oar and slammed it against the moving hull and drove his own boat away, losing his balance in the process and tumbling into the water.

Another boat, heavy with water and too sluggish to move quickly, was tipped and swamped in the wake of the passing ship. It slid under the surface without a sound, its passengers shrieking as it went down.

The death-ship passed the boat where Charis sat mute with rage, seething inside. Seithenin’s face appeared briefly over the rail. Charis saw him and recognized him; she spat and saw him sneer, half-crazed with hate.

“Seithenin, I defy you!” The voice was Avallach’s. Charis turned to see her father standing in his boat: wet, bedraggled, but still king. His hate had roused him to shout his impotent threat.

The big ship’s rudder wagged sideways; the ship turned, the sail collapsed as it made to come at the boats again.

Men rushed about on the deck; the points of spears bristled at the rail. “They are coming back! They will kill us all!” cried a woman in a nearby boat.

But even as the ship heeled toward them, its sail flapping uselessly, it seemed to hesitate. The arc straightened and the sail puffed full again as it swung onto a new course. Seithenin appeared at the rail once more and called back, “I am sorry I did not kill you, Avallach! Now Oceanus will have to finish what I began.”

Charis turned and saw then what Seithenin’s captain had seen and what had driven him away before finishing his cruel work: Three fast triremes were flying toward them across the water.

“Belyn and Kian! We are saved!”

No one heard her. The others had seen the ships too and, overcome with relief, were shouting themselves hoarse.

Charis gazed around her. Of the ninety boats that had left Kellios harbor, she estimated that fewer than fifty remained: some had drifted away in the night, others had been struck by flaming debris or scuttled by the tidal wave, and at least three were destroyed by Seithenin-although most of the passengers of the rammed vessels were still alive and clinging to floating wreckage.

The ships struck their sails as they came gliding nearer. The oarsmen in the fishing boats eagerly plied their oars, bringing the rescue craft close, and the first of the passengers clambered up the hulls of the larger ships on nets flung over the rails. Charis saw to it that all passengers were rescued and the cargo taken aboard before she allowed herself to be pulled up onto the deck.

Belyn stood before her, exhausted, wreathed in an air of sadness. “I knew you would find us,” Charis said as Belyn gathered her into his arms.

“Charis, I am sorry,” he whispered, and she felt his tears warm on her neck. “We could not come sooner.”

She pulled away. “Is Elaine…?”

“Safe, I think. There is one other ship,” explained Belyn. His shoulders sagged in a gesture of futility. “Kian has it- they are all in Kian’s hands now.”

The three ships were nearly full with rescued survivors. Charis made certain that Avallach, Lile, Morgian, and An-nubi were safely aboard and that the cargo she had worked so hard to preserve was secured before collapsing exhausted into a corner.

Belyn called orders to his captain, which were relayed to the other ships, one of which was in Maildun’s care. The sails rustled up the masts once more, flapped, and puffed full in the breeze, and the ships strained forward, moving out to sea.

They had not sailed far, however, when they heard a howl, distant and menacing, carrying over the water. Those at the rails lifted their heads and saw thick clouds lowering over Atlantis. Spider-threads of shining crimson lava flowed over the unsteady landmass, gushing up and out of numerous gaping rents in the earth.

Smoke snaked over the water in wispy tendrils so that Atlantis appeared to float on night-dark storm clouds. The hot air smelled of sulfur and burning stone. Sooty ash drifted down in a filthy snow, blacking everything it touched. Although it was well past midday, an inky twilight prevailed. The survivors huddled on the decks in the darkness, their drawn faces illumined by lurid flares and lightning.

The howl became a vast, soaring hiss that spread out from the broken shell of the island to fill the world. Charis closed her eyes and heard in the ugly sound the rush of departed spirits hastening on their deathless flight. Someone jostled her shoulder and she looked up. Annubi stood over her, his eyes red in the fireglow. “Come and see,” he told her.

She rose and followed him to the stern where they pushed their way to places at the rail. Atlantis had shrunk utterly, its once-vast terrain now merely a cluster of broken mountains, wrecked Atlas a shapeless black hump in the flame-shot darkness.

The sibilant hiss intensified, overlaid by another sound, like that of an enormous cloth being ripped from end to end, a great tearing-the fabric of the world torn in two from one end to the other. The sound grew and filled the world, overwhelming the ships and their frightened passengers.

Then, while they all watched, the dark hump of Mount Atlas sank inward upon itself, heaved, and burst in a final shattering cataclysm of fiery destruction. The awful force vomited up gas and dust, and debris rose in a magnificent churning pillar whose top was lost high in the streaming clouds above. A moment later they saw the shock wave racing at them over the water, flattening the wave crests.

It hit like an invisible hand, knocking the observers off their feet, rattling the ships to their planking. The shock wave was accompanied by a screaming wild wind that caught the flagging sails so sharply that the masts bent and cracked. The triremes were driven helplessly over the water, their decks slanting almost vertical. Charis, gripping the rough decking with her fingers, lay flat and held on, her eyes squeezed shut to keep out the stinging salt water.

The wind flew past them across the sea. Smoldering chunks of rock debris whistled from the swollen sky, hot and trailing white smoke, sizzling as they struck the sea and sank in a welter of steam. Glowing missiles struck the ships, sputtering and fizzling as they skittered crazily, burning into the planking, setting the decks afire. Down rained the deadly hail. Charis heard a shriek and saw a woman race past her, scurrying for safety, a child clasped tightly in her arms, the hem of her tunic fluttering with a bright border of flame. She ran to the woman, knocked her to the deck, and beat out the flames with her hands, then pulled a bit of sailcloth over them hoping to weather the firestorm.

They crouched together under the canvas and Charis realized that her companions were Lile and little Morgian, their faces white beneath smeared soot, hair gray with ash. Lile peered at her blankly, without recognition. I must look as unnatural to her, Charis thought; she does not know who I am.

“Lile,” she said, reaching out her hand. “It is Charis, Lile. We are alive and we are going to survive. Do you hear? We will live.” Morgian whimpered softly, but Lile did not respond; she turned her face to stare out at the ghastly hail.

The mountainous wave that followed the last explosion lifted the light ships precariously high before sending them plunging down into the deep-riven trough. The wave passed beneath them, hurtling on its way across wide Oceanus, building power and speed as it went. The thought of what that wave would do to the first landmass it encountered made Charis shudder.

When the firestorm had passed, Charis and Lile threw off the sailcloth and looked out across the water into an immense impenetrable curtain of smoke and dust all around, so thick they could no longer see the ships nearest them.

Through the interminable night, the triremes drifted in a dead calm sea. Survivors collapsed, slept where they fell, awakening to a murky sunrise. The sails hung limp and useless from the masts. Ash still drifted like snow, coating the water with a foul, thick sludge. The dense air stank of sulfur.

For three days the ships drifted idly in the still water. On the fourth day the sun rose as a pale, gray disk, burning through the brown sackcloth sky. By midday a fitful breeze out of the south scattered the last tattered remnants of smoke, and the people looked out across Oceanus. Where Atlantis had been there was nothing now but a dull expanse of filthy water. Not a rock, not a grain of sand, was left. Atlantis was gone and only the faintest wisp of steam rising from a vast seam of bubbles marked the place where it lay.

Atlantis was no more.