Out of the Waters (6 page)

Her face became briefly expressionless before resuming its look of bland acceptance.

—that no one in the vast audience was paying attention to Saxa. Wonder at the performance had overwhelmed every other interest and speculation.

There were six ships in the air now, moving with increasing speed and agility as they rose. A few glass figures were on deck, generally standing at the tubular equipment in the bow. Each of these ships had a figure in gleaming armor in the stern where the helmsman of a normal vessel would grip the steering oar. A few ordinary human beings in tunics were scattered among the squadron, working at undecipherable tasks.

Though the sky was bright, the sun had begun to flatten and turn crimson on the western horizon. When the sea began to roil, Hedia thought at first that it was a trick of the light on the wave tops.

The flying ships curved toward the disturbance, continuing to climb. The water was suddenly as bright as blood. Something started to rise from it.

The thing was huge beyond all living measure.

*   *   *

A
S THE OCEAN BEFORE THEM BOILED
, Alphena leaned forward. She felt an anticipation which she couldn't understand, let alone explain to anyone else.

A tentacled horror the size of an island rose on hundreds of twisting, serpentine legs. It paused for a moment, then surged toward the city. Two of the flying ships turned toward the creature and sprayed flame from the apparatus in their bows.

An arm hundreds of feet long curled out, coiled around the stern of one vessel, and clubbed it across the hull of the other. Both broke apart, spilling bodies and fragments. The bow of the free-flying ship splashed into the sea and sank. The monster hurled what was left of the ship it held toward the city.

This is wrong!
Alphena thought.

As if she had blinked and cleared a distorting film from her eyes, Alphena saw a human giant where she had briefly imagined a monster. His iron gray hair had been caught in a pair of braids that hung down his back. His only garment was a leather breechclout on which colored splints picked out a border and a sunburst design.

The muscles wrapping the giant's broad, bare chest were as distinct as if a sculptor had chiseled them. Water cascaded from his body; he took another calm step forward.

The giant looked at Alphena. He smiled, the first expression she had seen on his face. He had an enormous dignity, the sort of feeling that the statues of gods should project, but never did in Alphena's experience.

He's not a giant!
Alphena thought. She was certain of that, for all that he towered over the city walls and the tiny figures on them.
He's my brother's height!

The four remaining ships flew toward the giant in line abreast. His face lost its smile; his right arm moved as swiftly as that of a gladiator casting his net. His fingers slapped the endmost ship, flinging it into its next neighbor. Both broke apart. The two surviving vessels curved off.

The man reached into the water as if groping for clams at the shore. The remaining ships slanted toward him. One pulled ahead and sprayed flame across the man's left shoulder.

Instead of reacting to the attack, the man straightened slowly; the muscles of his back and arms bunched with the effort. A plate of rock tilted up in his hands; a section of the city walls lifted with it. The thick metal walls bent like foil, then tore from bottom to top.

Spectators on the battlements, tiny by contrast, had begun to flee from the man's approach. Those who had not yet gotten clear fluttered away like chaff from a threshing floor.

The vessel which had sprayed fire now sheered away. The second, no longer blocked by its fellow, slid in. As part of the same smooth motion that had torn the slab from ground, the man threw it.

The rock sailed through the air like a hard-thrown dirt clod, but each of the pieces weighed tons. The nearer ship vanished like a cherry blossom caught in a hailstorm. The more distant might have escaped had not a sheet of gleaming wall tumbled through it lengthwise.

He knew what he was doing from the moment he bent over,
Alphena realized.
He had decided how to destroy them before they even attacked.

Varus studied history and literature, making connections between separate events in a fashion that astounded scholars far older than he was. Alphena was interested not in books but in gladiators. That might be unladylike, but she had come to suspect that her own mind was as good as her brother's, or nearly so.

A successful fighter swam through his battles the way a hawk did the air. Alphena had never seen anyone in the amphitheater who displayed more liquid grace than this half-naked barbarian.

He's magnificent. He's as old as my father, but he moves like a weasel. A huge, powerful weasel.

The man wriggled his shoulders, loosening his muscles after the effort of moments before. His left arm was angry red, and blisters were popping up on the skin. Alphena thought he might rub the injury, but instead he merely shrugged and grasped another shelf of rock.

This time he rose from his knees instead of lifting with his back muscles. A quarter of the city toppled inward, shattering tower against tower to fill the streets with fragments.

The great slab rolled back. The man caught it, braced himself, then lifted it overhead.
It must be as heavy as the cone of Vesuvius,
Alphena thought.

She was as thrilled as she had been the afternoon she watched the swordsman Draco defeat seven netmen consecutively, a feat never before accomplished in the amphitheaters of Carce.
He's magnificent!

The giant smashed the slab down onto what remained of the city. The vision was soundless, but pulverized dust exploded outward to settle on the sea and the surrounding forest promiscuously, like a gray pall.

The man turned his head. Alphena thought he was looking straight into the Tribunal. He smiled minusculely—

At me!

—and reached down for another mass of rock. The sea behind him bubbled, surging up the passage he had torn into the land.

Magnificent.

*   *   *

V
ARUS TOOK NOTES
as he observed the monster. He had filled the four leaves of his first notebook and was already well into the extra one he had brought as an afterthought.

He smiled slightly. Perhaps he could scribe additional notes on the Tribunal's stuccoed railing. If he had considered that possibility, he would have inked notes on shaved boards instead of scribing them on wax with a bronze stylus. Of course, he would probably have run out of ink by now also.

Pandareus had been making odd motions with his hands, curling and opening his fingers in a complex pattern.
Is he praying?
Varus wondered.
Or is that some foreign gesture to turn away evil?

He was just opening his mouth to ask when Pandareus said, “I've counted three hundred and eighteen legs on the side we can see. And we don't know with a creature like this that the entire underside isn't covered with legs, instead of them being placed only around the outer rim of the body.”

He's been counting, using the position of his fingers as an abacus!
Varus realized in a gush of relief. He wasn't as willing to claim prayer and charms were superstitious twaddle as he might have been a month ago, but it still would have been disturbing to see his teacher descending to such practices.

Aloud Varus said, “You said, ‘A creature like this,' master. You think there are more of them?”

Pandareus laughed. They were probably the only two people in the theater who found humor in the situation. That spoke well for philosophy as a foundation for life, or at least for a dignified death.

The creature was tearing a path into the island, hurling increasingly large pieces of soil and bedrock into the ocean behind it. Its hundreds of tentacles worked together, waving like a field of barley in a breeze. They groped down into the land, then wrenched loose great chunks of it.

“Master?” said Varus as he jotted down details of the creature's legs. They were all serpentine, but some had scales, some had nodules like a gecko's skin, and the rest included a score of different surfaces and patterns. “It … Does it look to you as though it's growing larger as it proceeds?”

“Very well observed, Lord Varus,” Pandareus said approvingly. “Note that the channel behind the creature is narrower than the front which his body is cutting now. Perhaps it's devouring the rock, do you suppose? Though that doesn't appear to be the case.”

Varus could see his companions in the Tribunal, but the audience in the belly of the theater was either hidden by the vision of destruction or had vanished into the blur that extended from the visible margins. Except—

Where the orchestra had been, the three strangers who accompanied Tardus were sharply visible. They glared at the creature as it tore through whatever stood in its way. The mixture of fear and fury in their expressions reminded Varus of caged rats, gnashing their chisel teeth in a desire to chop and gash in the face of certain death.

“Lord Varus?” Pandareus said without any hint of emotion in the words. He raised an eyebrow. “Is this your doing, I wonder?”

“No!” said Varus, angry for an instant. Then, when he had analyzed his response, he was embarrassed.

“I beg your pardon, teacher,” he said. “I was afraid you might be correct. I
am
afraid you might be correct.”

“You have mistaken a question for an accusation, my lord,” Pandareus said dryly. “The teacher who failed to train you out of that defensive reflex is to be censured. Furthermore, my question was rather hopeful.”

He gestured with his open left hand toward the vision. The monster was wreaking destruction at an accelerating pace.

“I'm quite certain of your goodwill toward mankind generally and toward me in particular, you see,” Pandareus said. “I would have been glad to learn that you had brought this thing into being; because if you did not, I have to be concerned about the intentions of who or what
is
responsible.”

The creature lifted a block of land greater than its own huge bulk, spun it end for end in its tentacles, and sent it crashing into the sea. The vision dissolved in spray.

Varus flinched instinctively, but the gout of water seemed not to reach the Tribunal. He had an impossibly good view of what was happening, but none of his other senses were involved.

“Master,” Varus said, “if I knew what was happening, I would tell you; and if I could stop it, I…”

The words dried in his throat. Pandareus and, on Varus' other side, his family, were fading into a familiar gray mist which replaced the spray thrown up by the vision.

He was not moving, but reality shifted around him. He knew that he was walking through a foggy dreamworld in which other shapes and beings might pass nearby without him seeing them; but he knew also where he was going and who would be waiting when he arrived there.

Varus climbed up from the fog; it lay behind him in a rippling blanket, as though it filled a valley. The ancient woman sat under a small dome supported by pillars. Framing the top of her high-backed chair were two huge boar tusks.

No pig is that large!
Varus thought.
It would have to weigh more than a ton.

The ivory was yellow, and the tips had been worn by heavy use. He remembered that Apollonius claimed that Hercules sent the tusks of the Erymanthian Boar to Cumae.

“Why do you come to me, Lord Varus?” the old woman said. “The power is yours, not mine.”

“Sibyl, I know only what is in books,” Varus said, using her proper title. “Tell me what I saw in the theater.”

Then, because he knew his body remained seated with his family in the Tribunal, he said, “Tell me what I am seeing.”

The Sibyl turned her head, looking down the slope opposite to the direction from which Varus had approached her. He followed her eyes to the scene he had been viewing in the theater, but now he watched as if from a great distance above. The creature ravaged an island or rather a series of six rings, each inside the next larger and all touching or nearly touching at the same point of the circles.

Volcanoes,
Varus realized. Or anyway,
a
volcano which had erupted six times on successively smaller scales. The craters were nested within one another, but cracks in their walls had let in sea to create a series of circular islands.

Even the most recent event must have been far in the past. Except where crystal palaces sparkled, heavy jungle covered the rims of the cones and their slopes above sea level.

The creature itself had grown to the size of an island as it demolished the linked cones. Varus remembered waves washing over the sand palaces he had built on the beach at Baiae when he was a child.

“You see Typhon destroying Atlantis,” the Sibyl said. Her voice was as clear and unemotional as the trill of nightingale. “The Minoi, the Sea Kings of Atlantis, were not such fancies as Plato believed when he invented stories about them. But I know only what you know, Lord Varus.”

I didn't know that!
Varus thought. He grimaced.
She knows what I think, whether I speak or not.

“Mistress?” he said. “Is it real, what we see? Is it happening?”

Spray and steam concealed whatever was left of the ring islands.
Will the creature break through to the fires remaining under the surface of the sea? And if so, what then?

He doubted that Typhon would be harmed even by a fresh eruption. As for Atlantis, it could scarcely be more completely uprooted than it was now.

“It may have happened, Varus,” said the Sibyl. “There are many paths, and on this path Typhon destroyed Atlantis.”

“What happened next?” Varus said. He looked into the old woman's eyes. Her skin was as wrinkled as that of a raisin, but her features nonetheless had a quiet dignity. “After, after
Typhon
destroyed Atlantis, what did it do?”