Empire of Dust (35 page)

Voice of Gods

by Eleanor Herman

Chapter One

Summer 362 B.C.

Lightning illuminates the muddy road before her with an eerie blue-gold haze. She sees a flash of green hills rising and a few bent olive trees, then darkness falls again so completely it is as if someone threw a heavy blanket over her head. Thunder booms as Helen feels the earth shake. Still, she forces herself to put one squelching boot in front of the other. Her cloak is dripping wet and her teeth are chattering. But she can't stop. Not yet.

She had no choice but to leave at sunset and during a storm, just as the guards were closing the town gates for the night. Her heart almost stopped beating when she saw they had already started pushing the massive doors shut—and if they closed, they would trap her in this city where she would surely be found. She slipped out just in time and heard the huge iron bar slide into place behind her. Now
they
were locked inside, the men who meant her harm.

Urgency propels her forward. As soon as morning comes, they will discover she's gone. They will search the town and race out the open gates. She must be somewhere safe by then. But where? This road, she knows, leads ten miles to the capital of Caria, Halicarnassus, on the sea, though she has never been there. She has never been allowed to leave Theangela.

The men with horned helmets wanted her for something bad—something much worse, even, than what Koinos planned to do with her. She was in the room behind the cloth shop dying wool in a boiling vat of madder when she saw them come in asking for Koinos: two warriors, tall and powerfully built, wearing helmets with huge horns. One had a gray-streaked beard; the young one had dark brown skin.

Smoke drifted into her nose and she felt her backbone tingle.
Beware the swords of horn-helmed Lords;
they'll seek to bind you with harsh cords
, the voices inside her mind said, and every hair on her body stood on end. Thunder rumbled like a lion roaring a warning. Helen grabbed her cloak and ran out the back door toward the town gate, leaving behind the only life she had ever known.

Twelve years ago, Koinos found her outside those same town gates on the Pigrean Hill, where people put unwanted infants on the night of the full moon when couples who have lost a child or can't have one of their own go out with lanterns to choose one. Those who are left behind are eaten by animals. Koinos picks all his girls that way, raises them in the nursery and, when they are four, starts training them in weaving and embroidery. “Tiny fingers,” he says, “make the best cloth!” At fourteen, the girls are sent to work in the House of Aphrodite next to the cloth shop, entertaining men. Helen has seen them go—she knows it wouldn't have been long until she followed them.

Helen is an excellent weaver, but for months the prophetic voices that take control of her body and burst out of her mouth have been disturbing the other girls. The voices are always there, quietly listening in the fringes of her mind even when they're not speaking. She must inhale smoke for them to spring to life, a wisp from an oil lamp or fire pit, a torch or cook pot. Lately she has been avoiding smoke whenever possible, which means also avoiding light and warmth. Even so, a draft often pushes a curl of it into her nose or mouth, and then up into her head, and immediately the voices start again. They even invade her dreams, turning them into nightmares as she shrieks out loud and wakes up the entire house.

Koinos was going to sell her to those strange men. Men seeking magic.

He was going to sell her
because
of the voices.

She'd had no choice but to leave.

Rain cascades off the hills, turning the dirt road into a sucking quagmire. Helen can hardly pull her feet out of the muck. How many miles has she walked? How can she keep going? Ahead on the left is a tree, leafy and wide-limbed. Perhaps she could sit beneath it awhile to get out of the driving rain. Then she smells it—the strange, fresh smell that comes just before lightning strikes.

Before she can move, a trail of blazing light zigzags through the sky and hits the tree. For a moment the bolt hovers like a giant glowing-white skein of wool, one end touching the tree, the other rising miles into the heavens. Then the tree explodes, violently flinging branches like warriors' spears. She throws herself on the ground and covers her head. When she looks up, she sees the remains of the tree in a ball of fire, sizzling in the downpour. All around her, branches are impaled in the ground. Smoke drifts into her nostrils and her vision blurs.

Seek the palace in heaving seas

The god Poseidon embraces its knees

Kissing you with bright sea foam

He will guide you to your home.

The voices murmur through her, tingling down the lengths of her arms and legs, moving inside her like the smoke. She must seek safety by the sea.

Halicarnassus.

* * *

The morning that comes is barely a morning at all, just a slight lessening of darkness. Rain still falls in sheets. Her stomach grumbles loudly. Stumbling forward, her legs leaden, Helen finally sees the enormous walls, square towers and arched gate of the capital. The gate is open. Relief causes her to shake.

She walks past prosperous houses and shops, public baths, squares and fountains, but sees only a few individuals, holding cloaks or blankets over their heads and ducking into doorways. No merchants have set out items for sale. The outside tables at taverns are empty, and the windows of all the houses shuttered. As she walks to the harbor, she smells salt air and damp stone and wood smoke rising from roofs. She puts her hand over her nose and mouth, trying not to breathe it in. Just now, alone in broad daylight, she must avoid an episode at all costs. The men may gallop into town soon, looking for her.

At the water's edge, she stands in nearly horizontal rain, watching dozens of boats, large and small, bumping against one another on long piers. The harbor is roughly circular, with two breakwaters of fitted stone curving in from either side of the mouth and rising about twelve feet high. They are fortified with gates and parapets and ornamented with columns that remind Helen of legs.
Poseidon embraces its knees
. The left breakwater connects the mainland to an island palace with towers, battlements and turrets. It must be the palace of King Mausolus and his family. Yes, that is where she is supposed to go. But the breakwater gates are closed.

To get a better look at the island, she lurches down a pier, against the wind, as boats on either side of her jostle and crash and groan, their ropes creaking. At the end of the pier, she has to lean into the wind to avoid being blown over. The water is a heaving, boiling maelstrom. Even if she could swim, she doubts she could make it across these turbulent currents.

A wave slaps her feet, another her knees. She swallows hard, trying to right herself even as the next one towers above her, slamming her onto the pier with the force of a predator pouncing, and then she's dragged with it into the sea—helpless—as if it is taking her back to its lair to devour her. She clenches her eyes shut, the breath trapped in her lungs longing to release. The sea pummels, tosses and beats her. She is almost ready to give up, to sink deeply into this violent, roiling darkness. Her mind begins to slip away.

And then she is surfacing. Gasping. Flailing. Air hits her lungs hard, desperately.

There's an object bobbing in her vision—a small canoe, trailing ropes. It must have come loose from the pier in the storm. Helen grabs a rope and pulls herself toward the little boat. She has no idea how to climb in, and then a large wave pushes her up and slams her inside. The force echoes along her spine. She gags, coughing up seawater, lying with her back along the bottom of the boat. The next wave thrusts the canoe toward the island, its tall crest crashing down on her like a giant hand slapping her body. Helen curls up with her palms over her face, water sloshing all around her and more of it tumbling down on her. She hears a faint whimpering, like that of a small child—dimly, she realizes the sound is coming from her. The boat rises high on swells and falls deep into troughs as the wind whistles and howls.

Finally, the canoe crunches onto land.

For a long moment—she isn't sure how long—she simply lies there, unable to open her eyes, unable to move. But eventually she is overtaken with shivers.

She crawls out of the tiny basin and stands unsteadily. There's a path. She staggers to it and follows it up toward a garden as leaves whip around her and branches clatter to the ground. Halfway to the palace, she collapses, unable to move.

After a time, the wind dies down and she hears the familiar sound of wood against wood—slatted shutters being opened—and a girl's voice. “Guards! There's a girl out there in the garden. Bring her in!”

Copyright © 2015 by Paper Lantern Lit LLC and Eleanor Herman

ISBN-13: 9781459294875

Empire of Dust

Copyright © 2016 by Paper Lantern Lit LLC and Eleanor Herman

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