The Rings of Poseidon (18 page)

It may have been thinking about the imminence
of my death that did it, but there was another firm 'click' and I
was back in my body again. I could see the high priest in his mask;
I couldn't see his face but I could see his eyes, glittering with
the fire of fanaticism and I shall never forget those eyes if I
live for a million cycles of our sun. But I will never see even a
single cycle of our sun. Death awaits me soon. The last thing I
will see is those eyes - cold, ruthless, evil and with an icy
light: an unconsuming, all consuming fire. Those eyes, glittering.
Those eyes. Eyes.

Chapter 15

To say that Alicia 'went white' with shock is
inappropriate, considering her colour, but she was certainly shaken
and she sounded faint.

"I suppose with human sacrifice so common it
was inevitable that one of us would end up with first hand
experience," she said, "but all the same I didn't expect it to be
me."

"Where do you think you were?" asked
Frank.

Alicia hesitated. "The country was known as
Atl-Andes," she said. Now that isn't saying anything about where it
was, or when either. All I can say is that they called it
Atl-Andes."

"Atlantis?" asked Steve.

"I prefer not to face that question for the
moment."

"It was the Bronze Age," remarked Gill, "no
doubt about that."

"I'm well aware that it was three or four
thousand years before the usually accepted date for the development
of bronze but I prefer not to face that problem for the moment
either," said Alicia.

"That high priest sounded a complete
fascist," observed Gill.

"He was. In the real sense of the word. I
don't think there's much doubt about it. All his talk about
'strength' and 'power' meant his own power, and lots of human
sacrifice to support it, especially anyone who opposed him."

"You mean he chose those who opposed him?"
asked Alan.

"Anyone who stood in his way was likely to be
first in line for the altar, yes. It wasn't so much sacrifice as
ritual murder of his opposition."

"How did he get away with it?" asked
Steve.

"I'm not sure. Atl-Andes was fairly religious
and peaceful. I don't think the sacrifice of human beings was known
before that generation, that high priest, even. I don't think
people even killed or ate animals either, but he thought that was a
sign of weakness." Alicia paused and looked out of the window.

"It's drying up a bit outside so let's get a
short session at the dig and talk about this whole thing later. I'm
worried about Professor Harrington coming."

"Before we go and I forget," said Gill, "did
I remember correctly the priest saying the amulet was a protection
against the rings?"

"He did say that, though I'm not sure what he
meant."

"The rings must have had powers," said Alan,
"and the amulet was some sort of protection against them. You're
sure you don't know what powers the rings were supposed to have
had?"

"I don't know anything about the rings," said
Alicia. "I don't know anything about the powers - real or
imaginary."

"You'd better try the ring and see if we find
out," said Steve, half joking.

"Not now," said Alicia. "In the first place,
I haven't sorted out what Alicia believes from what Chimú believed.
Secondly, you promised a work session and I'm holding you all to
it."

Steve roused himself and went out of the
cabin to root out the volunteer gang. The rain had stopped and the
weather was what the makers of cheap cameras seem to call
'cloudy-bright', with a watery sun trying to break through. It was
still damp underfoot but everything was drying.

As he crossed the field to start the second
generator, Steve was thinking about the full story of the ring from
its making to its losing and its finding. He couldn't believe that
it ever had 'powers': such things belonged to tales of fantasy and
adventure. A story like that owed more to dungeons and dragons: to
elves, dwarves, wizards or even hobbits, than to reality or
archaeology. That the high priest who had had the ring made was
interested in power himself, Steve didn't doubt, but he thought
that the ring was probably only a symbol.

'Mind you,' he thought while he was checking
and starting the generator, 'five, probably six, people with past
lives connected with the ring together at one time and in one place
is a bit of coincidence. If it's not a coincidence, that is an
awful lot of power.'

The story was, of course, very incomplete.
The six rings had started their journey from Atl-Andes (and that
might have been Atlantis - the jury was 'out' on the subject')
before the meteor, or whatever it was, and had been taken to North
Africa or Southern Spain. Since then there had been about seven to
ten thousand years of people and lives. Steve thought Manjy's story
was probably set in Southern Spain and she had said the ring had
landed not too far away.

'That would be in keeping with Frank's tale
starting in the Northern foothills of the Pyrenees,' Steve thought
idly, wishing he knew more about the movements of people in
prehistoric Europe. He had no idea how the ring crossed Spain, but
it had two or three thousand years to do it. The journey from
Northern France to Southern England was a short one and could be
easily explained, and Gill accounted for part of the ring's
northward journey. There were so many unanswered questions that he
gave up trying to think it thing out logically as the diggers
assembled.

The paid labourers were missing because there
was no way to get in touch with them at short notice, but the rest
of the team were willing workers and got on with excavating the
site. Frank took all of the sand out of the tunnel as far as the
third house while Manjy and one of the volunteers sifted it.
Numbering and removal of roofing stones of the third house began as
a preliminary to excavating it, removal of sand from the second
house continued and more of the connecting passage was
uncovered.

When Steve had almost finished getting the
evening meal ready, Gill strolled back to the Portacabin to help
him. She walked in, carefully closed the door that he had left open
and went almost secretively to the window.

"Coast is clear," she said, more to herself
than to Steve. "They're all still working on the dig."

He watched in silence while she switched the
computer on and it booted up. She keyed the programme directory and
selected one of the data disks. Steve watched her without comment
as from the main menu she moved to the record of items found. She
turned up the record of the talisman. It read "Neck ornament,
amulet or talisman. Appears to be metal with accidental or
deliberate coating which has aided preservation - see also 001073
and 001075 found at same location."

Still without comment Steve watched her
delete the entry and flip to 001075. The record was "Small piece of
rusted iron, possibly a spear or arrowhead - see also 001073 and
001074 found at same location." Gill tapped a couple of keys to
"amend entry" and deleted the words "- see also 001074 found at
same location." She struck another key to renumber the remaining
entries after the record deleted, so that the correction was no
longer visible, and exited from the programme. She switched off the
machine and crossed to the cabinet where the finds were.

Gill didn't explain herself and Steve still
said nothing, as she opened one of the drawers and took out the
amulet.

"Look," she said as she pocketed the amulet,
"I don't know why I'm doing this, so don't bother asking, but I'd
rather this amulet was misplaced for a day or two and went back
into circulation later. I'm going to put it in my room."

She looked hastily and furtively out of the
window to make sure they were still alone and then hurried across
to her room. This was certainly a puzzling development, apparently
in Gill's psychic deviousness, but also in the behaviour she had
shown up to this point.

She was gone only a moment before she was
back. "I promise I'll return it twenty-four hours after the
professor arrives." she said rather breathlessly. "In the meantime,
don't tell anyone it's on my wardrobe shelf."

"What is?" asked Steve and busied himself
with supper, thinking how much Gill had changed and grown in
confidence in the last few days, since remembering her past life as
a priestess. Gill helped him with the meal, thinking in passing
that she was growing more trusting of her own psychic abilities by
the day. Among other things, those psychic tendencies suggested she
could depend on Steve.

"I'm going to try and calculate the date on
our present calendar when those cycles would have zeroed," said
Frank to Alicia after supper was cleared away.

"Well I think I'll get on with my diary of
the digging in case my professor comes tomorrow. I don't want to be
caught unawares."

"You do that thing. Where's Manjy?"

"Writing home, I think. At least she received
some post this morning."

"You going to mention the ring in your
reports?"

"I shall leave everything except the finding
of the ring out of my archaeological report, but I think we ought
to each write our stories down somewhere before we forget
them."

"Yeah, that could turn out a smart move." he
agreed, and got up to go to his room. Alicia wondered briefly where
Gill and Steve were before settling down to write up her
report.

In her room Manjy was reading a letter rather
than writing. To her surprise her grandmother had sided with her.
According to her father she had suggested finding a prospective
husband who would take account of her career.

This would have been nothing out of the
ordinary in a European family, but it was unusually perceptive for
an Asian woman who spoke almost no English. At any rate, her
grandmother had persuaded her father more effectively than Manjy
herself could have done and a compromise looked possible. She
picked up her pen to write.

In what was left of the fading light, Gill
walked companionably on the beach with Steve.

"What do you make of it all?" she asked,
feeling more relaxed than she had for a long time.

"While I was a guest of her majesty I read a
book from the prison library by a German bloke called Otto Muck. He
invented the snorkel that allowed U-Boats to breathe under water
during the war. Clever scientist was Otto Muck, with a lot of
inventions to his name. Well, he had the idea that a whole set of
seemingly unrelated events and problems could be related and
explained if there was a major land mass which sank beneath the
Atlantic in a volcanic disaster triggered by an enormous meteor
about ten thousand years ago.

First problem was that the warm waters of the
Gulf Stream couldn't have run in their present course during the
ice age or the glaciers wouldn't have come as far south in western
Europe as they did in eastern America. But the glaciers were an
even distance south in both."

"Oh, so that's what your question to Frank
was about. I did wonder." said Gill. "Let's sit down here for a
while," she added, testing the grass of a sand dune to see it was
dry.

"Where does the meteor come in?"

"Somewhere in the Atlantic, at its deepest
part on a fault line just off Charleston, South Carolina," he
answered, putting an arm round her shoulders. "For complicated
reasons of physics which he argues convincingly, he claims that a
roughly oval shaped collection of craters running into the sea
there are the debris of a huge meteor or small asteroid breaking
up. The main impact would have been out to sea - just on the line
of weakness. The resulting eruption would have been large enough to
allow molten rock out in huge quantities, perhaps large enough
quantities to allow a considerable island to sink. Right about
where the Azores are. He reckons that they were once high mountains
- and one of them was probably the original Mount Atlas."

"That would more or less tie in with Plato's
story of the destruction of Atlantis," admitted Gill.

"It would tie in with the Mayan obsession
with the cyclic nature of time as well. The eruption probably took
place when several cycles zeroed and Otto Muck gives an exact date,
though I can't remember what it is," said Steve.

"It might also explain the name of the
ocean," remarked Gill thoughtfully, adding, "Nobody seems to have
done that satisfactorily. 'Atl' is the Aztec and Mayan word for
water. The mountain range in South America is the 'Andes'. Alicia
said the country she came from was called Atl-Andes. That's awfully
like 'Atlantic' and has the same root as 'Atlas'. Atlantic is a
name around in ancient times and, in classical mythology, Atlas was
the giant who held the sky on his shoulders."

"Atl-Andes," Steve ruminated, exploring the
sound of the words as he rolled them around, "The 'Mountains in the
Water'."

"High mountains on a low lying island must
have looked like that from a distance," mused Gill. "Perhaps Atlas
was a very high mountain. It might have looked to the first people
as if it was holding up the sky."

She leaned her head on Steve's shoulder and
looked out to sea. "This is a pretty low lying group of islands,
isn't it?" she remarked. When Steve didn't say anything she
continued. "I almost didn't come you know. I wasn't sure I could
face up to it but I simply steeled myself and got on with it."
Steve kissed her.

"Well I'm glad you did. But, as I've said
before, I don't know why you ever thought he was worth killing
yourself over."

"I'm over it all now. If you come back to my
room to-night I'll show you how completely I'm over it."

"Is that a serious invitation?"

"Of course it is."

"Then I'm going to take you up on it."