The Rings of Poseidon

The Rings of Poseidon

Mike Crowson

Copyright 1985 Mike
Crowson

Smashwords Edition
2010

The Rings of Poseidon

Prelude

The drum beat kept a time which was easy for
an oarsman to follow, even one as new to the task as me, and we
slipped round the maze of canals at a steady pace. The city is a
good walk from the sea but the main channel is wide, straight and
deep and the ship made it with no alarms. Once out in open water we
shipped our oars,the crew hoisted our sail and the helmsman set a
course round the island and across the true ocean, for that was
where 'Gate of the Sun' was bound.

I am - was - probably the best smithy and
metalworker in the whole of the city, of the country perhaps. There
may be the odd one as good as me, I suppose, but none better. I'm
not a young man any more and I've worked in metals all my life, and
it's thirty summers or more since I began my apprenticeship. Now I
flee for my life.

I started the usual way, casting the rough
blocks of metal into the blades of swords, for the hands of the
more expert craftsmen, who heated and hammered them into shape, so
that the metal took an edge. As I became a more expert craftsman
myself I began to specialise in finer work. I set up alone, making
lamps for homes and temples, thuribles and containers for incense,
carefully hammered into shape and all of them delicately
decorated.

In later years I have had time to experiment
with other ores, heating them and noting the effects. The ones that
melted easily I tried mixing and working. I found some which were
too soft for swords but good for jewellery; some I decorated with
painted clay and heated again, and others were very tough and took
a fine edge. I never had a mate. I lived alone and metals were my
life and my hobby - I think that's why I became so skilled.

So how does an established, skilled,
respected craftsman like me become a wanted man, hunted in the city
and forced to flee for safety across the true ocean? No matter: I
slowly, carefully, thoroughly, angrily called down the wrath of the
gods upon that corrupt little man and his overweaning, usurping,
insidious power I had fled to escape. I cursed him to his doom.

All the cursing made me feel a little better,
but probably did him no harm at all. Eventually the top of the
highest mountain fell from sight, the wind dropped and we got out
the oars again.

After the noon break on the sixth day there
was a sudden sound. The sea and air shook. The sky began to fill
with the smoke of a great volcano far astern and the sea became an
uneasy calm. There was a kind of greasy swell, like dirty water
when you cool heated metal in it. Then a great wind came and we
drove before it: a hot and fiery wind and the ship sped over the
water, hastened by that fierce furnace of a blast. But fast as we
travelled we could see a great wave coming towards us even faster.
A wave like a great and towering cliff. A wall of water many
mastheads high.

I do not know whether the high priest was yet
struck down, nor whether my curses had been heeded, but the gods
were none too pleased about something!

Chapter 1

The woman leaned into the wind, tugging up
the zip of her light blue waterproof jacket, and strode angrily
across the wet, tussocky grass. A fine rain was swirling in from
the sea just beyond the rising hillock ahead of her, wreathing like
smoke in the chill breeze, soaking her hair and running down her
face and jacket to complete the misery of her anger.

"Racist pig," she thought to herself yet
again, "and sexist. Damn it, he only did this to me because I'm a
woman and black".

In fact, though Alicia Graham was a tall and
intelligent woman of Afro-Caribbean extraction, at that moment she
was faced by problems that were essentially Anglo-Saxon. Well,
Celtic or pre-Celtic, anyway

Just at the crest of the rise was a hollow
bearing the signs of recent digging, and what looked at first sight
like a pile of stones. In spite of her state of mind, Alicia
couldn't help at least a cursory glance. She saw at once the
arrangement of the stones was not random, but the work of human
hands and very old. Her obsession with her subject overcame her
resentment towards this particular assignment and she looked, felt,
absorbed the ever so slight remains.

The wall was made up of almost unshaped
stones, matched together in the remnants of a very primitive,
almost primeval structure. The digging - 'Can't call that an
excavation,' Alicia thought, with a mental sniff of disdain -
showed the wall going down into the sand for several feet. She
considered this. 'Perhaps,' she reflected, 'the ruin simply silted
up with sand blown from the beach. At any rate there's enough
wind!' she added as an unspoken thought, tugging unnecessarily at
the zip of her Cagoule. Interest had evaporated her anger, at least
temporarily, as she applied her mind to the excavation of the
site.

Alicia turned from the comparative shelter of
the hollow to the crest of the low hill and looked towards the sea.
It was an uninviting, cold grey with flecks of white. Across Scapa
Flow you could see Mainland through the misty rain. "Not the
mainland," she thought. "Just Mainland, the main island of the
Orkneys."

It hadn't really been a rough crossing, only
miserable, with this chilly, gusty wind and the steadily soaking
drizzle. She stood, looking at the sea but with her mind elsewhere,
back at the University with Professor Harrington, thinking of her
blazing row with him....

"Miss Graham," said the tetchy little man,
"you are lucky in the extreme that the department has funds to send
you anywhere at all. Our benefactor, if I can call a major company
that, has stipulated that one of the investigations supported by
them must be in Scotland." With an air of finality he added, "And
that's the one I've given you."

Alicia Graham, however, had set her heart on
an excavation close to the Jordan/Israel border. Not only would the
weather have been better and the site itself established and
interesting, but she had been there before during her post-graduate
years and felt sure she would be returning.

The Professor had made his choice of who was
to lead the Orkneys team from three doctorate students, on the
basis of which one was least likely to create a fuss about an
unpopular assignment. His choice was inevitably based on the whole
of his prejudices and experiences which, in turn, reflected his
background and career as an elderly academic. Possibly Alicia's
assessment of him reflected much truth. At any rate, she had worked
herself up into a fine rage for this interview and she was not
ready to be easily put off.

"There's a matter of my team," she said,
"You've given me a fine collection haven't you? A romantic nervous
wreck on the rebound from a broken relationship, a cultural refugee
who'll try anything to stay away from home a little longer, a
pimply pratt who's a double failure and a soccer hooligan to look
after the technical side."

"You aren't going near any soccer matches."
said Professor Harrington somewhat lamely as she paused to draw
breath. He wilted a little before her wrath. Alicia was
exaggerating, but there was again an element of truth in what she
said now, as there had been in her assessment of her Professor. The
latter was beginning to wonder whether he had been mistaken in his
choice and underrated Alicia's capacity for fighting back.

The sea hissed on the sandy beach of this
part of Hoy and the wind would, no doubt, have blown sand around
the dunes, had everything not been soaked by the driving drizzle.
She pushed her hair back from her face and realised how wet she had
become. This side of the high island shelved towards the sea and
should have been protected from the prevailing westerly wind by the
higher western slope. The present sodden wind was from the North
East. Alicia faced it reflectively. She had exaggerated the
personal deficiencies of her team.

"Let me introduce the members of your team",
said the Professor. "This is Gillian Meadows. Miss Meadows has
taken a year off from study, but she proposes to rejoin the
post-graduate course this year."

"How tactful", thought the tall, fair haired
girl, wryly. "What he means is dropped out, messed up my life and
tried to end it." It was only her determination to start again
where she had left off that kept her from feeling hysterical just
coping with meeting these people. "I don't know if I can handle the
work," she thought, as she shook hands with the West Indian woman
who was going to be in charge of the dig, then added to herself,
primly and severely, "Of course you can manage it."

"Miss Meadows wants to specialise in the
Bronze Age and later Stone Age. This expedition will be valuable
experience for her," said the professor, expanding on his
introduction.

"I'm looking forward to this project very
much," said Gillian, but she was expressing an enthusiasm she
didn't entirely feel. "I hope I can keep my mind on my work now,"
was the thought pounding through her brain. "I don't know for
certain I can cope yet. Still, I've got a month or so to sort
myself out yet before we start, and I'm damned well going to
try."

Gillian listened to the splatter of rain
against the caravan window with each gust of wind. It wasn't a
storm outside: the wind was no more than an unpleasantly stiff
breeze and the rain was no more than a heavy drizzle blown on the
wind. "But I didn't fancy going out with Alicia," she thought. "Not
that she asked."

Two caravans to live in. Well, sleep in. Two
of those small portable cabins joined together to make one larger
one for meals and a study, plus a store shed. This caravan was
comfortable and pleasantly warm. Outside it was falling dark. "I'll
get up and make her a drink," she thought , rousing herself from
the bunk where she had been lying on top of the covers,
relaxing.

Alicia became aware of her dripping hair and
soaking trousers. She turned from the beach, still considering the
lie of the land, and walked back towards the remains. At the crest
of the hill she paused to bend down and scratch at the ground
beneath the clumps of long, narrow-bladed grass. "Sandy." she
murmured, a picture forming in her mind.

She straightened up, skirted around the
digging and strode back towards the little group of caravans, now
showing lights. Her anger was gone - not, perhaps, her
disappointment with her assignment, but at least the anger which
had clouded her judgement earlier. She had formed an opinion and it
would be nice to see whether it proved correct.

The caravan door opened and Alicia squelched
in.

"Grief Ali, you're soaked. I was just making
you some cocoa. I thought you'd be damp but you need spin drying.
Here's a towel for your hair."

"Thanks, Gill. I didn't notice how wet I'd
got. I was thinking about the lie of the land and...."

"Dry yourself first or we'll have our team
leader laid up with pneumonia."

The location is just like Skara Brae", said
Alicia as she stripped off her Cagoule, steaming now in the warmth
of the caravan. "Right up against the beach of a fairly sheltered
bay. This site is a better spot for a settlement really, it's only
exposed to the east."

"Do you really think it's another entire
underground village?" Gill sounded excited.

"Ah, well... Let's be cautious. Skara Brae is
the Pompeii of Northern Europe. The sand blew in sometime about
2000 BC and preserved it complete with stone age furniture. We'd
known about sunken houses before it was discovered, but this was a
whole group of them linked by underground passageways. All I'm
saying so far is that the whole hillock by the beach there could be
artificial and the site does include some walling that seems to be
Stone Age or early Bronze Age. That and the location being
similar."