‘Why?” Meriam whispered. “Why hate us this much?”
Then… everything went still. The birds had gone, their panic and their screeching gone with them. The villagers who had tumbled from their beds into the village open place now stood, their voices quiet, looking south over the beach to the calm sea.
It was south. Whatever was so very wrong was south .
A dog whined, then another, and Meriam had the thought that the cacophony of the birds was about to be replaced by an equally frightful shrieking of the village dogs.
It never happened.
At the very moment that thought crossed Meriam’s mind, there was a blinding flash of light far to the south. The light, first white, then a terrible orange, was reflected both in the thin haze of clouds and in the sea, magnifying its effects a hundredfold.
Meriam, as all who stood transfixed with her, barely had time to gasp before they first felt their eardrums swell and burst, and then were lifted far off their feet by a pressure blast of such magnitude and heat that most were dead before they hit the ground.
Those who were not killed in that initial blast died when the molten rock rained from the sky or when, just as the sun finally crested the flaming horizon, the first of six successive tidal waves washed over the low-lying lands of Naxos.
By the time the sun had reached its noon peak the Aegean world had turned gray and black. Dense clouds of ash, pulverized rock, deadly gases, and steam had mushroomed twenty miles into the sky and spread over the entire eastern Mediterranean region; thick, choking poisonous ash drifted down to layer corpses and ruins alike with, eventually, two hundred feet of death.
The island of Thera, which sat almost halfway between Crete and Naxos and which contained in its
harbor the glorious shining city of Atlantis, had exploded with such force that the entire island—save for a thin, sorry rim of smoking rock—vanished beneath the waves.
In its dying, Thera poisoned every land and every city within four days’ sailing.
THERA WAS ONLY THE FIRST, BUT ADMITTEDLY THE most spectacular, step in Ariadne’s curse. Thera’s eruption not only largely destroyed Naxos, but also the northern coastline of Crete. Tidal waves and the murderous rain of molten rock and ash inundated villages, harbors, and the great founding labyrinth that lay partway between the coast and the city of Knossos, which lay almost two miles inland.
Thera, Naxos, and Crete—as well as a score of smaller islands within reach of either the initial cataclysmic blast or the tidal waves—were devastated. Farther distant, to the north and south in the lands of Greece, Anatolia, the Levant, and Egypt, the effects were not so initially devastating, but crept more secretly upon the peoples of the region.
Crops failed for years afterward, and any man or woman who had breathed too deeply of the ash that continued to trickle out of the sky for months after the initial explosion often succumbed to terrible growths in their lungs in later life. Wells were poisoned, and livestock and children alike sickened and died. People rebelled and overthrew governments and societies and abandoned their gods; in Egypt a man called Moses used the death that rained down from Thera to force the pharaoh to set his people free.
In Athens, Theseus watched as his queen, Phaedre, died in an agonizing childbed, calling out her sister’s name. In sorrow, he comforted himself with a young virgin called Helen, before he set off on many wandering adventures about the Aegean looking for his own revenge on the woman who had cursed him.
He never found her, but found everywhere the effects of her curse, and, in his very wanderings, spread the effects of Ariadne’s curse farther and farther.
It was why she had not killed him outright.
Having survived Thera’s massive destruction, the people of those Aegean cities left discovered, to their horror, that the Game that had protected them for countless generations was failing. The Game, a labyrinthine mystery of great power and sorcery, was used to entrap the evil that was always drawn to communities of wealth and contentment. Without it, cities became increasingly vulnerable to the predations of evil, of wrongdoing, of misfortune, of greed and sloth and hubris and all those mischiefs that haunt success and happiness. Cities fell to invaders from the north and west, or were consumed by earth tremors, or by fire.
Evil incarnate itself walked free. Ariadne’s destruction of the Game and of its protective sorcery meant that Asterion was reborn into life to work his malevolence and depravity where and as he pleased.
In vain did the Kingmen of the cities, those men who through birth and training worked the magic of the Game alongside their city’s Mistress of the Labyrinth, try to arrest the decline. It was pointless, because the mischief that ate at the Games’ powers had been generated by the greatest Mistress of them all, Ariadne, who had controlled the founding Game at Knossos on Crete and who had most apparently found the means to undo all the workings of lesser Mistresses about the Aegean.
And Ariadne could not be found. She could not be stopped, and her mischief (as that of her half brother) could not be arrested.
There was worse. As the lands and cities failed, falling to mischief after mischief, so also the gods failed. Whatever Ariadne had tapped into, it was so powerful that it affected even the gods on their heights.
The cataclysmic explosion of Thera had shattered both the equanimity and the confidence of the gods.
It had also seriously depleted their power and thus their means to try to undo what Ariadne had wrought.
Thera’s beautiful circular harbor had contained a great island—the island within the island—upon which rose the majestic citadel of Atlantis. Center of Aegean culture and supremacy, Atlantis had also contained the ancient and mystical God Well… the major source of succor and power for the gods.
Without it, the gods were not only ineffective, but they grew ever more so as each day passed. With the destruction of Thera and Atlantis, Ariadne had dealt a killing blow to the gods at the very start of the unwinding of her curse. At the height of their powers the gods could have stopped her; now they could do little but mouth feeble curses themselves… and succumb to the evil that stalked every part of Aegean life.
And so, as the seasons passed, and year turned into year, Ariadne’s curse wrapped the Aegean world in its malevolent web. There were meager moments of glory, an occasional hour of laughter, but they became increasingly rare, and they passed entirely that day that the Trojan prince called Paris, enamored of the beautiful wife of the Spartan king Menelaus, stole her back to his home city of Troy.
Menelaus’ wife was Helen, the girl who had comforted Theseus when Phaedre had died, and who had given him her virginity. Touched by Theseus, Helen was herself a walking curse. In her name all of Greece embarked upon a exhausting ten-year siege of Troy that ensnarled not only the Greeks and the Trojans, but the gods themselves. Weakened by the continuing effects of Thera’s eruption as well as by the progressively worsening deterioration of the Game, Troy’s collapse dealt the final death blow to the ancient Aegean gods.
Many died amid Troy’s smoking ruins, others crept away to agonizing, lonely deaths amid the rocky peaks of Olympus. A few managed to keep drawing breath: Aphrodite, who secured Aeneas’ escape from Troy, along with the magical kingship bands of the city; Hera, who, weeping, swore a revenge for Ariadne’s destruction of all that was lovely; Poseidon, who crept away to his watery haven and took no further part in the lives of mortals; and Hades, who, alone among the gods, found a measure of strength within all the death.
Within a generation or two of Troy’s destruction, Aphrodite had gone, murdered by her sorrow, and Poseidon was nothing more than a faint blue shadow moving slowly within the ocean’s depths.
Hades kept to his Underworld, wanting no more to do with the mortal realm.
Only Hera, crippled, dying a little more each day, was left to try to undo what Ariadne had wrought.
PART ONELONDON, MARCH F rank Bentley hurried along the railway platform at Waterloo station, scanning the few remaining people standing about. The train from Dover must have come in a half hour ago at least; had he waited? Or grown impatient and decided to seek out a hotel for the night?
He slowed his steps, looking more carefully, wishing he had more than just a casual description to guide him.
His eye suddenly caught sight of a tall man, swathed against the evening chill in a greatcoat
over his uniform, the brim of his military cap pulled low over his eyes, the glow of a cigarette in one hand, a suitcase and a bulging satchel huddled by his legs.