But even in the gloom, looters would have seen Ebisha's necklace.
Gold. Deadly gold. Meriones stood up. “Ebisha?”
“Is she there? Is she all right?” Hokar called anxiously from the doorway.
Meriones knew he was not thinking clearly. He was too tired, and his brain was numbed by grief. Yet he must try to shield his friend, if he could, from an awful discovery.
“You stay there, Hokar!” he ordered sharply. “I'll find her, just a moment now ⦔
He fumbled about the room, stumbling over furniture. The dog tried to crawl after him, then sank back and lay panting.
Meriones came to the couch lying on the floor like a slain animal, feet upward.
Not lying flat.
There was something beneath it.
Meriones took hold of two of the legs and eased the couch onto its side.
Ebisha, a lifeless heap, had been underneath the couch.
Meriones held his breath for one agonized moment before calling out to Hokar. Let Hokar think, for that moment longer, that she might be alive. It was a small gift to give.
Meriones touched the dead girl's shoulder with gentle, regretful fingers ⦠and felt her stir beneath his touch.
“Hokar!” he cried. “She's here, she's alive, come quick!”
Hokar flung himself into the room as if he had never been injured.
Between them they righted the couch and lifted Ebisha onto it. Some random part of Meriones' mind noted that she was heavier than Tulipa. Bigger-boned, from a bigger race.
Tulipa. Don't think about her.
Ebisha coughed and opened her eyes. “Aaannh?” she asked uncertainly.
Meriones told her, “You're alive, we're here. It's all right.”
“Aaannh.” Her eyes closed again, satisfied.
A hasty examination showed her to be stunned, but uninjured. Only the dog was injured. It whined pitifully, begging for Meriones' attention.
They had brought no water after all. Meriones had to run back to the well to fetch some. Every step of the way he expected to be attacked, but he was unchallenged.
He filled the pitcher and ran back to Hokar's house. Some water sloshed from the pitcher as he ran, but he arrived with most of it.
Ebisha was awake. She lay cradled in the goldsmith's arms. With one hand Hokar kept stroking her hair as if to assure himself she was real.
She was coughing when Meriones entered the house. She reached eagerly for the pitcher and gulped down half its contents. She choked, spluttered, drank the rest.
The coughing eased. She managed a wan smile. “The dog saved me. Strangers came. They saw the necklace and tried to take it from me, but the dog attacked them and fought them. They had knives, though. They would have killed us both. But then the necklace broke and they took it and ran because the dog was growling so savagely. They hurt him, but he never stopped growling!”
Meriones went to the dog and knelt down beside it. He stroked the animal's head tenderly. “You're going to be all right,” he said. “We'll take care of you. You're safe now.” The dog thumped its tail weakly against the flagstones.
“You're my dog now,” Meriones added.
The feathery tail wagged harder. He could have sworn the hound understood.
He made another trip to the well, and got enough water to drink and to bathe the dog's wound. He was as gentle with the hound as he had been with Tulipa, pouring all his care and concern into his task, venting his amputated love.
They stayed in the house, waiting, but they did not know what they were waiting for. No one else bothered them. Hokar retrieved
the gold nuggets from their hiding place, then seemed to lose interest in them. He sat with the package held loosely in his hands as he stared off into space.
Meriones eyed it. A thought occurred to him. “Hokar?”
“Mmmm?”
“Where did you get the gold for Ebisha's necklace?”
There was no answer. Meriones persisted. “Did you get it the same way you got those chunks of raw gold?”
Hokar looked down.
“Ah.” Intuition moved through Meriones, forming a mosaic in his mind. “You stole it. And because you had stolen, you thought I would steal too.”
Hokar said nothing.
Meriones carried his thoughts a step further. “Tereus stole Ebisha and the others from the Islands of Mist. They were free people, but he made them slaves. There has been too much stealing. We've made the gods angry, that's why this disaster has befallen us.”
Ebisha looked intently at Meriones. “Do you think your gods did this? Do you think they are powerful enough to do this?”
Meriones ran his hands through his hair. “They must be, how else could it happen? So we must find a way to placate them. We have to give back what was stolen.”
“Not my gold,” Hokar said abruptly. His fingers clamped on the package in his lap. “I need this to buy Ebisha's freedom.”
Ebisha said in a wondering voice, “I think I'm free already. Who at the palace cares now what has become of me?”
“She's right,” Meriones agreed. “The pair of you could vanish completely and no one would ever ask questions. So many have vanished ⦔ He paused, swallowed hard, went on. “If there are any ships leftâand there must beâin time you could even make your way to the Islands of Mist. Take Ebisha home, return something that was stolen.”
At the word “home” a great light dawned in Ebisha's green eyes.
Hokar responded to its blaze. “I suppose we could go down to the coast and ask about Tereus and the
Qatil;
they were due in. If we can't find them, there will surely be other ships taking refugees out. Everyone will want to leave Crete after this.”
“Not everyone, but many,” Meriones agreed. “I would like to leave myself. There's nothing left for me here,” he added in a low voice.
Ebisha clapped her hands. “Then come with us to the Islands of Mist!”
Meriones looked at Hokar, who had believed him capable of theft. “I don't know ⦔
Hokar rightfully interpreted the musician's dubious expression. “You must come with us,” he said. “You're my friend. My friend forever, beyond any doubt.”
Meriones slanted his gaze sideways, to the injured hound lying nearby. “And my dog?”
Hokar laughed. “Bring him. We owe a debt to that dog.”
“Hear that?” Meriones asked the hound. “We're going to the Islands of Mist!”
The dog lifted its head, wagged its tail, and grinned.
They gathered what food they could find and a waterskin, then made a bundle of these using one of Hokar's blankets. In the bottom of the bundle were the gold nuggets. Ebisha was assigned to carry the bundle, while Hokar leaned on her shoulder.
Meriones carried his injured dog.
Their waiting over, and firm in their resolve for a new beginning, the trio set out for the coast.
They traveled through an alien landscape. In places the hot ash was knee-deep and getting deeper. Great cracks had opened in the earth. Some of these revealed fire raging in their depths, devouring debris. Scorched, singed, and shaken, the Minoan empire was in ruins.
“The Mycenaean warlords have been waiting for an opportunity like this,” Meriones remarked, unable to walk long in silence. “When they realize what's happened here, they'll probably attack Crete and take over the Mediterranean.”
Hokar was not listening. He was not interested in politics or military adventurism. His eye was drawn to a burned tree standing alone against the sky. Its twiggy, blackened branches formed an elegant pattern, like freehand filigree by a master craftsman.
I could copy that, Hokar was thinking.
He was so intent he did not notice the fissure in front of him until he lost his balance and swayed precariously on its brink.
With a shriek, Ebisha grabbed for him.
At the bottom of the fissure a roaring fire waited.
Hokar tumbled forward.
Ebisha caught him at the last possible moment. But she had to drop her bundle to do it.
The bundle fell into the heart of the flames.
“My gold!” Hokar cried in dismay, reaching toward it.
Simultaneously, Meriones felt a stirring inside himself, like intuition. Like inspiration. His voice boomed above the roar of the fire. “Let it go!” he commanded.
As if in response, a red-gold belch of flame soared upward, driving Hokar and Ebisha back. Meriones stood alone on the edge of the fissure. Alone with the fire.
As it scorched his skin, awe bubbled through his blood. An ancient heritage came alive in him. His grandmother's voice sang to him in the hiss of the flames.
“Yes,” Meriones whispered. “Yes.”
Suddenly he knew, beyond thought, beyond question, what elemental power had been unleashed when Thera exploded. In the flames he saw, for one heart-stopping instant, the face of the old priest who was Ebisha's grandsire.
“Yes,” Meriones said a third and final time. He arched his back and pressed his knuckles to the Palace of the Brain in salute. Then he stepped back to safety.
“The gold is gone,” he told his companions. “We have given it to the fire.”
The stone sat on its hillside and thought. Its thoughts were not cerebral. It had no cerebral cortex. Nor were they visceral. Stones do not need viscera. The thoughts of stone are the thoughts of earth, compacted, weighed down by the eons, thrust upward by cataclysm, encased in ice. Immobile for millennia. Then pushed, shoved, dragged, dropped.
The
stone
sat
where
the glacier had abandoned it. The
surrounding
landscape slowly
changed.
Vegetation appeared, softly
mantling
the
ice-scraped
soil. Trees
grew. Great lizards came. And disappeared. Mammals rubbed their itching sides on the stone to rid themselves of parasites.
Rain poured over the stone; rain from its cousins the mountains, who helped shape the weather, controlling wind currents and influencing the amount of precipitation.
Sun shone.
Change followed change.
Two-legged mammals arrived. They recognized the stone as fearsome and holy and bowed in worship before it. In what served as its consciousness, the stone thought this behavior just and proper. It was part of the sacred earth.
Then different, paler, bifurcated beings arrived, and began slaughtering the worshipers of the stone.
Annie Murphy sat in the twilight of her fine frame house with the book on her lap. It had grown too dark to read unless she lit a lamp, and Annie did not like to waste oil. There would be God's daylight tomorrow
and she could read more. Meanwhile, her thin fingers stroked the leather cover of the book. The smell of new leather drifted up to her. Her fingers caressed the gold stamping on the cover. It read: NEW HAMPSHIRE AS IT IS. A GAZETTEER. And the date, brand-new, gleaming gold: 1855.
Annie Murphy sighed a contented sigh. She was a wealthy woman, by her reckoning. She had a fine new book to read that would last her through the hard New England winter to come and well into spring.
“No bigger than a bar of laundry soap after a hard day's wash,” was the way she described herself. Tiny, meticulous, she ruled the Murphy household with an iron hand. There was only one wayâher way, and nothing less than perfection would suffice. But her eyes twinkled as easily as they snapped, and her fine-boned face and slim little body radiated good humor.
She had peculiar eyes for a descendant of Irish immigrants, almost almond in shape, dark, exotic.
“My Annie's family had someone born on the wrong side of the blanket sometime,” her husband said to his cronies down at the feed store. He, Liam Murphy, was as Irish as they came, there could be no doubting his pedigree. His blazing red hair and freckles were indisputable proof. “I come from the Murphys of Wexford,” he loved to boast. “The Boys of Ninety-eight.”
But the heroes of the most recent doomed Irish rising against English oppression meant nothing to hard-bitten New Hampshire farmers gathered around a potbellied stove in the feed store at Conway. What mattered was the oppression of the oncoming winter and the anticipated depth and duration of the snow it would bring, which would shape all their lives for the next six months.
“You reckon it's gonna be next May again, afore mud season?” Benjamin Osgood was asking Daniel Foster.
“Don't know yet,” the other replied. “Ask me next week.”
Daniel Foster was the local weather prognosticator. He had an uncanny record for accuracy, as well as owning Conway Feed and Grain. The two combined to make him an important personage indeed.
Ben Osgood sighed and tugged at his lower lip. A balding farmer, he had courted Annie McDonnell, as she was then, before Liam
Murphy married her. Annie's forebears had emigrated from the glens of Antrim in the north of Ireland back in 1719, seeking religious freedom. As good Presbyterians they had been welcomed into strongly Protestant New Hampshire.
But Annie had a blot on her escutcheon. One afternoon she had entertained her new beau by reading to him from her family Bible and Ben had discovered, to his dismay, that her mother came from a long line of Donegal Catholics.
The religious tolerance of the Osgood family did not extend to Papists. Ben married someone else, and Annie eventually married Liam Murphy, who adored her and was clearly happier with her than Ben Osgood ever was with his wife, a repressed and judgmental Freewill Baptist.
When Ben was in Liam Murphy's company, he was inclined to suppress an envious sigh from time to time.
Liam was saying, “My wife Annie'd sure like to know how you predict the weather, Danâl. She'lows as how it'd be a right valuable skill for me to have for my ownself. Lord knows it's hard enough to make a livin' when the weather's with you. When it's agin you, a man can starve to death.”
Daniel Foster smiled thinly. “Weather prediction is a valuable skill,” he agreed, “and I make too much money sellin' my predictions to farmers like you, to start givin' away the secret. But that's just like Miz Murphy; alluz thinkin', ain't she?”
Liam glowed with pride. “She's got a good head on her. Reckon it comes from all those books she reads. I fetched her home a new one when I was down to Moultonborough. Thing called a Gazetteer. Tells about soils and crops and towns and history. Annie's interested in all that.”
“Cain't think why,” Ben Osgood interjected. “Woman oughta be interested in her house and her children.”
“Annie is interested in'em,” Liam told him. “She plans to teach our children outta them books. But she says this here Gazetteer has a lotta information in it that'd be useful to a farmer. She'll read those parts out to me in th' evenin's. She'll read every word in that there book. She loves to read anything about New Hampshire and the mountains. She purely loves this part of the country.”
Ben Osgood snorted. “Don't set much store by bookish women, myself,” he said contemptuously. “My wife now, she's a good
Christian woman and she puts up good preserves. That's what a man needs.” He tilted his cane-seated chair back and laced his fingers over his belly as if he were the final authority on women.
To himself, however, he was thinking, I wonder what it would be like to be married to Annie McDonnell? That busy little way of walkin' she has. And the quick smile on her. She's alluz thinkin' of somethin' to help Liam. Liam Murphy's not much of a farmer. Never been much of a farmer. He couldn't grow rocks in a field if Annie didn't keep a fire lit under him.
Bet she lights a fire under him in bed too.
His mind far away, Ben tilted his chair back farther, crucially misjudging the weight-to-angle ratio. The back of the chair grated against the wall, then the legs shot forward and deposited Ben Osgood, chair and all, on the sawdust-covered planks of the feed-store floor.
The other two men guffawed.
Ben, red-faced, scrambled to his feet. “There's a devil in that thing!” he said of the chair.
“Ain't no devil,” Foster retorted. “You lean back too far, you fall. It's a natural law, and cain't no one go agin natural law.”
With a sullen scowl, Osgood shrugged into his coat and stomped from the store.
“Man ain't got no sense of humor,” Daniel Foster remarked.
Liam Murphy gave a lazy grin. “You ain't exackly famous for your sense o' humor either,” he told Foster. “My Annie says you're as mean as a ruptured goose.”
Lean and irascible, Foster was not inclined to take an insult from any man. But he was not offended by Annie Murphy's statement. Everyone knew she had a twist to her tongue. She also had exotic dark eyes that tilted up at the corners, and a ready laugh. Foster was perversely pleased to think she had spoken of him at all.
“Mean as a ruptured goose,” he repeated, mouthing the words to get their full flavor. “Happens I am, I reckon. To them as gits crosswise of me.” He sounded proud.
Unconcerned, Liam Murphy yawned and ran his thumbs under his suspenders, easing the pressure they were bringing to bear on his flannel shirt. Liam was easily the tallest, strongest man for twenty miles in any direction, and another man's temper didn't worry him much.
Nothing worried him much, as long as he had Annie. She did the thinking and the worrying for both of them.
“Reckon I better get on home myself,” he remarked. “Days're closin' in. I like to be with the wife when the light's gone.”
Such open acknowledgment of fondness for one's spouse was rare among Conway people. Privately, Foster thought Murphy was tied to his wife's apron strings. But just as no one wanted to make an enemy of the man who owned the feed store and predicted the weather, so no one would make fun of big Liam Murphy.
“Give the missus my regards,” Foster said.
Liam got to his feet, stretched, scratched himself in both armpits, retrieved his heavy coat from its peg, then vocalized the all-purpose New England “A-yuh” and left the store.
Murphy had been the last man in the feed store that evening, aside from the proprietor himself. When he had been gone a suitable time, Foster ambled over to the front door. He looked up and down the dirt road that was called, rather grandly, Main Street.
No one was approaching from either direction. Lamplight glowed from the windows of the false-fronted hotel across from the store. Off in the hills, a hound bayed at the cloud-shrouded moon.
The darkness crouched among the mountains, waiting.
Foster shivered, crossed his forearms over his chest, and rubbed his upper arms to warm them. Then he stepped off the porch and walked around the store, fastening the heavy wooden shutters, known as Indian shutters, tightly over the windows. He went back into the store, shut and bolted the door, and barred the Indian shutters from the inside. A second set of interior shutters was then also closed and barred.
He took his rifle down from the rack behind the stove and lovingly cleaned it, squinting down the barrel, wiping the highly polished stock with a soft cloth, working the mechanism to be certain it was in firing order. Overhead he heard the creak of the floor that told him his wife was moving about in their apartment over the store. She would be putting his supper on the table. It was time to go.
He made a final round of the store, checking both shutters and door again.
Then he shouldered his rifle and climbed the stairs.
Meanwhile, Liam Murphy reached home. Home was a cabin that
had been built by his neighbors, according to custom, the week after Annie agreed to marry him. Not a town house, it was constructed of pine logs, well chinked, with two rooms and a sleeping loft. The house was connected to the much larger barn by an enclosed dogtrot. The barn had been raised first, of course, being the more important structure.
Liam lifted the latch, pushed the door open, and called a cheerful, “Annie! Where's my girl?”
“Ssshhh, you great ox, you'll wake the children.”
“They abed already?”
“Of course they are. I put the baby to bed before the sun goes down. She's fretful without lots of sleep.”
“I thought Johnny might still be up,” Liam said hopefully. Seven-year-old Johnny was his father's pride and joy.
Annie bent to the fireplace, lowering the cast-iron pot on its chain to heat up stew for Liam's meal. “I couldn't keep that boy up forever, waiting for you.” Her voice was brittle.
“Aw now, Annie, I was just down to the feed store, talkin'. No harm in it.”
“No harm? Sometimes menfolk stay talking at Foster's till all hours.”
“Not me,” he assured her. He tried to put his arms around her. She pretended to avoid him, then yielded, letting him pull her tight against his chest. The bottom of his red beard brushed the top of her head, where the glossy dark hair was sleeked back into a bun.
With her nose pressed against Liam's body, Annie inhaled the familiar, beloved smell of him, the smell of male sweat and wool flannel and, on a deeper level, the fragrance of the stony soil he worked, permanently absorbed into his flesh.
Her voice muffled against his chest, she asked, “What way did you come home?” and immediately bit her lip.
“Same as I alluz do,” he replied with the infinite patience of one who has been asked a question too many times. “Up the orchard road to Mason's top field, then'cross Dalrymple's meadow.”
“You didn't see any Indians? You didn't go near the rock?”
Liam laughed, a comforting earthquake of a laugh that rumbled out of his chest and into Annie's bones. “'Course not. I told you afore, I ain't scared of Injuns but I know better than to go near their sacred rock.”
“That's good,” Annie murmured.
But she knew her man. She knew Liam Murphy would not let anything dissuade him if he ever took it into his had to come home by way of Pine Hill. And he might just do it sometime, to prove he was not afraid.
As he sopped up the last of the stew with the last of Annie's buttermilk biscuits, Liam remarked, “Mason got a mighty fine lot o' hay outta his top field this year. He had a good barley crop too. Got the rain just right, and a dry spell for harvest. That man has all the luck. Wish I was him this year,” he added wistfully.
Annie shook her head. “If everyone had to hang their troubles on a clothesline for the world to see, and you were told to pick one, you'd pick your own.”
“Meanin' what?” Liam asked, amused as ever by his wife's sayings.
“Meaning Susan Mason told me in town last market day that her husband has a tumor in his belly Dr. Smith can't fix,” Annie said. “She sat right there in her nice shiny new cut-under buggy, with me sitting waiting for you in our old spring wagon, and told me with tears in her eyes. So don't ever wish to change places with anyone else, Liam. You don't know what you might get.”
When they lay in bed later, Liam's healthy snores shook the rope supports that held the ticking mattress. Annie lay open-eyed beside him, but it was not his snoring that kept her awake.
She was reproaching herself for mentioning the stone. If she kept on reminding him of it, sooner or later he would be perversely tempted.
“Keep your mouth shut, Annie Murphy,” she whispered angrily to herself, drawing the patchwork quilt up under her chin. “You just keep your mouth shut.”