Stolen Dreams (35 page)

 

The use of narcotics for
any
purpose was outlawed on Norona a millennium ago, but as a scientist,
Shara had studied it. Opium cultivation? Shara asked to confirm her
analysis.

 

Exactly. Still want to help?

 

Whatever it
takes, remember?

 

Ester
bent over and tilted a blossom to point out the capsule where the seed
develops. "It takes two days to collect the base for the potion from a
flower." With her fingernail she scraped the capsule and
a milky juice seeped out. "Some practice is required to apply exactly
the right amount of pressure. Tomorrow at this time the juice will be
solid and can be collected." She stepped over two rows and picked a
tiny chunk of dried juice off a seed capsule to show them. "I scratched
this row yesterday."

 

Jarad handed Gabriel a bucket and kept
one for
himself. "I welcome the help. We have been ordered to provide double
the amount we usually collect for the next two suns."

 

Following
Jarad's lead, Gabriel squatted down on his haunches to collect the tiny
bits of raw opium, but in seconds his legs and back were complaining,
so he switched to crawling in the dirt on his bare knees. He would make
Shara pay for this later, that much was certain.

 

Stop whining
and
get him talking. After squashing about a dozen capsules, she got the
hang of scratching them exactly right to draw milk. She simply didn't
allow herself to think about what she was doing.

 

"Why has the
order been increased?" Gabriel asked as they started moving along the
row, working first one side, then the other.

 

Jarad
looked at Gabriel as if he had asked a foolish question. "You are
unaware, as you said. I will explain. Every twelve moons the princes of
Atlantiss lesser provinces meet with King Jupiter in Poseidon's temple
in the royal city for seven suns. They and their courts require the
potion to keep their great minds in an elevated state throughout the
gathering. Today marked the fifth sun, but on the seventh night they
will need the most potion."

 

"Why is that?" Shara asked.

 

Ester's
fingers pinched a capsule so hard the blossom
snapped off. "Because a large quantity is required for the final
ceremony, particularly to calm the bulls. There are ten that will be
sacrificed to Poseidon." She took a shaky breath. "And so will an
infant and a maiden."

 

"What?" Shara exclaimed. Gabriel, can
this be true?

 

If
we've arrived when I think we have, I'm afraid animal and virgin
sacrifices aren't the only atrocities we're going to hear about.

 

Jared
turned to Gabriel with a pleading expression. "The king's servant
discovered that our only child, Rebekah, began her menses two moons
ago, and he chose her to be the honored maiden. But it is no honor to
us. Please tell us that you will be able to save her."

 

Gabriel
opened his mouth, but Shara was faster. "We'll help however we can."

 

Shara!.
We're only here to observe.

 

She gave him an innocent look.
They'll help us with our observations, and well help them in return.
It's only fair.

 

You can't change history!

 

What
I can't do is stand by while a young girl is murdered. They glared at
each other for a moment, then Shara looked back at Jarad and smiled
sweetly. "Why don't you tell us what you know about Poseidon and his
followers from the beginning? Then we'll figure out what we can do for
Rebekah."

 

Jarad shuffled a little farther down the row and
began the
story that had been passed on to him by his father and his father
before that, along with the awareness of what was right and wrong, good
and evil.          
 

 

"God descended from the sky, just as you did, but
he brought the Friends with him."

 

"Excuse me," Shara
interrupted. "When you say God, are you referring to Poseidon?"

 

Jarad
frowned at her. "Of course. Noe speaks as if it is another, but
everyone knows Poseidon is the most powerful of the gods."

 

Shara
decided it was best not to get into a theological discussion at this
point. "How long ago did Poseidon arrive?"

 

"That was eight of
my family's generations ago."

 

How many years would that be?
Shara asked Gabriel rather than have Jarad again wonder about her lack
of knowledge.

 

Based
on these people's average life span, it could be somewhere between
three hundred fifty and four hundred years. And before you ask, yes,
that means the continent could blow at any time. Now let the man tell
his story before I'm too crippled to walk upright again.

 

"At
first
the people were afraid of the visitors that called themselves Friends,
but they were very wise and showed the people how to improve their
lives. Their great powers were used to help, not hurt.

 

"The
Friends
taught the people to build shelters using the trees on the mountains
and dig ditches to carry the water to land that was too dry for crops
to grow. They built vessels that carried Friends and people over the
water to other lands, where they traded things that were plentiful here
for things that they did not have. Life was good and peaceful, and some
of the Friends took spouses from among the people."

 

"I heard
Poseidon sired children with such a woman," Gabriel prompted when Jarad paused to move
farther down the row.

 

"Yes.
Two, actually. It is said he was very lonely when he first arrived, for
his spouse had not survived the journey from the Otherworld. He was
brought out of his sadness by Cleito, a girl child of a couple who
dwelled on the mountain to the north of the royal city. When she came
of age, he took her to his shelter. She bore him five pairs of male
twins before she passed on. He chose another spouse after Cleito, who
was said to be a witch for the God of Darkness. She gave Poseidon
several more children, but made his life so miserable that he chose to
leave this land for his kingdom beneath the sea.

 

"Before he
left,
however, he divided the land up into ten provinces and gave each twin
one to rule. To his firstborn, Atlas, he gave the most valuable
portion, which bordered the sea facing the neighbors with whom they
traded goods. Poseidon appointed Atlas king of all the land, which he
then named Atlantis. Atlas's twin, Gadir, received the property
surrounding the royal province so that he might protect his brother's
interests, and his back, for God knew that not all of his children had
warm hearts."

 

He stopped his tale to take his and Gabriel's
buckets
over to a large woven basket and empty them. When he returned, he
needed no prodding to continue.

 

"By the third generation of my
family, all the first visitors had gone to join God in his undersea
paradise, and Atlas and his brothers began to make changes. The people
were put to work building a great temple in honor of Poseidon and
Cleito. New laws were set that forced the people to spend a longer time
laboring in the fields and quarries and prohibited them from traveling when and where they
wished. Punishments were delivered to any who disobeyed.

 

"Fearing
the growing power of the neighboring lands, especially Libya and
Athens, Atlas required a certain number of men from each province to
train as soldiers in his army to protect the island.

 

"He also
eliminated the law against brothers taking sisters as spouses, since he
lusted after his own sister, Hesperis. They had many daughters, but
only one son, and he was killed in a storm. So when Atlas went to join
his father under the sea, his youngest half brother, Saturn, became
king. Saturn was the son of the witch, born the year that Poseidon
departed, and it was believed that she taught him her evil spells and
removed his heart so that there was no bit of goodness in him."

 

Jarad
noticed Ester checking the position of the sun as it began its descent
toward the horizon. "Do not worry, woman. Thanks to these Friends, we
will have the basket full and the potion delivered to the palace before
the stars begin to shine."

 

Gabriel desperately needed to
stretch his
cramped muscles. "Tell me, Jarad, is there a place we could hide our .
. . vessel while we're here?"

 

"If you put everything in the
bushes, they should be safe enough."

 

Gabriel
promised to be right back and headed toward the beach to secure all of
their belongings. Shara decided he needed help and hurried after him.
"Is Beauty getting all of that?" she asked once they were out of
earshot.

 

"Yes, but so far it correlates with most of the
information
already recorded. What I didn't know is that there was a second set of
visitors. As near as I can figure,
Norona must have sent an inspection team to Terra to follow up on the
development. They would have made note of the problems they saw arising
and gone back to the Ruling Tribunal to report. Several hundred years
would have passed before anyone could have returned to take action."

 

"Then
it's possible that there's a messenger of death, so to speak, here on
Atlantis right now, preparing to carry out Norona's decision to destroy
the continent."

 

Gabriel shrugged. "That could explain Noe
hearing
God warn him to save his family, others like him, and the animals. But
I've always thought there was another possibility, and that's the one
thing stopping me from insisting we get out of here while we have the
chance."

 

Shara concealed her smile as she noted that he didn't
hesitate to use his mind to lift the raft and their bags in the air. He
brought it all down in the center of a clump of bushes. "Don't keep me
in suspense. What's the theory you're hoping to prove?"

 

He
started
to correct her phrasing, then realized she had worded it the way he had
in his own mind. "I've always thought the wholesale destruction of an
entire continent and a great number of innocents in order to punish the
degenerated descendants of the Noronian rebels was too radical on the
part of a ruling body as reasonable as the Tribunal.

 

"Instead,
consider this. What if a righteous person was sent here by the Tribunal
to issue warnings or place restrictions on the rebels' dealings with
the natives? What if that person found a situation so depraved and out
of control that he believed the instructions he'd been given were
inadequate to stop the cruelty? Knowing how long it would take to go to Norona for the support of a security force and
return, he may have taken matters into his own hands."

 

'Then
why would history state that it was the Tribunal's decision?"

 

"Perhaps
it worked so well to increase their omnipotent image, they chose to
take credit for it, then publicly regretted that such extreme measures
had been taken."

 

"The interesting part will come if your
theory is
correct and you try to release information that could puncture a hole
in the Tribunal's power base."

 

Gabriel winked at her. "Let's
take
one step at a time." He kneaded the muscles in his lower back. "Drek,
but I'm going to be sore tomorrow."

 

Putting her arm around his
waist
and pushing him back onto the path, she said, "I'll give you a good
massage before you go to sleep tonight."

 

He gave her a quick
kiss
for the offer. "By the way," he said as they made their way through the
thicket, "did you happen to notice that your fine-tuning of the
tempometer s destination program had the opposite effect that it was
supposed to?"

 

She pinched his side. "What I did should have
worked.
But we were practically hit by a bolt of lightning at the same time
that we hopped, remember? The electrical charge undoubtedly threw off
the balance. You'll see. Next hop, we're going to hit the date we want
right on the dot."

 

"I certainly hope so, since the next hop is
going
to be home." He waited for her agreement, but she kept silent. "Well?
Isn't it?"

 

She smiled up at him as they arrived at the poppy
field. "Of course, Gabriel. Whatever you say."

 

Why do I detect
some insincerity in that statement?

 

I have no idea.

 

And speaking of
insincerity, you never answered me before the hop—

 

"Oh, my,
Ester. Look how far you got without me. I'm afraid I'm not much help."

 

"Nonsense,"
the woman said. "You're doing very well for your first day."

 

Gabriel's
reaction to the idea that there might be a second day for them at this
task distracted him from concern over Shara's insincerity. She
determined to make sure that he wouldn't spend any more time doing
something that would sour his disposition before he discovered her
deceit. Besides, they could only learn so much in a field full of
narcotic-producing flowers. Somewhere nearby meetings were going on
with the descendants of the original Noronian exiles. She needed to get
hair samples from every one of them, particularly if Gabriel truly
intended to go home on the next hop. "Jarad, please continue your
story. Saturn had just become king of Atlantis."

 

As they
continued
to creep their way along the rows of flowers, gradually filling the
collection basket, Jarad brought them up to date.

 

Saturn
expanded
the laws set down by his half brother, further limiting the freedoms of
the natives, while also requiring them to give pleasure or receive pain
at the whim of the nobility. Like Atlas, he espoused his sister, Rhea,
not because of lust or love, but to keep her from running off with a
native man. It was said that he forced himself on her when and where he
pleased to constantly remind her of obedience, then kept her chained in
his room when he wanted her out of his sight.