CITY OF THE GODS: FORGOTTEN (74 page)

He pushed away from the padlock, exhausted from his efforts. The water was up to his chin where he knelt. “Take over, I can’t pound anymore,” he said. Dolates fell to his own knees, but being a bit shorter than his commander, he found his face half under water. He tipped his head back for a deep breath and crouched below the sturdy lock. He held his breath as he hammered with all his might, feeling pressure in his ears and lightness in his head from the effort. He shot up, grabbed a breath, and continued. When he had to go up for another he had to stand on the tips of his toes to reach the surface. He gulped, fearing the next time he swam up, there would be no surface at all.

Soon more hands began clawing at the lock and chain as the men desperately tried to aid him. It was useless. The Greeks, kicking and punching in close quarters, did more damage to each other than to the padlock. Dolates felt a sharp pain as a shoe slammed into his shin. Herikos’s face came near, shoving some of the other men away, and Dolates gasped out the last of his air, eyes fixed on his friend, who turned his face when they locked eyes.

When Herikos turned away from Dolates to hide his fear of death, he saw behind him a beautiful woman floating peacefully toward the padlock. She was smiling at him. Herikos thought he must have already drowned. There was no other explanation for her presence. She must be a shade come to escort him to the underworld. When she reached out and touched him, he knew he must be dead, for suddenly he could breathe as easily as if he were outside. The woman took him by the hand and pulled him up with her as she touched all the men thrashing in the water. At her touch, each Greek stopped his panicked movements. Herikos supposed they had all become dead like him. He floated up among his friends. All of them looked mystified. The top of Dolates’s head was butting up against the trap door, confirming that the room had completely filled with water. Herikos then realized the woman had let go of him and he looked around for her. He saw red robes trailing back down to the depths.

The Greeks floated about for a few seconds, feeling rather silly and wondering what they were supposed to do. Then a dull, cracking sound reached their ears as the chain was yanked from below and its mooring to the trapdoor came loose. The chain sunk as the soldiers gave an experimental shove on the door. It yielded. The men swam up through a few more feet of water and emerged into the compound. The battle they had fled had moved on, no doubt due to the flooding which was now threatening more than just the pits. Coughing and spitting out water, they marveled at their luck.

“We’re not dead?” Dolates looked to Herikos for an explanation.

“Not yet,” he replied. “But don’t ask me how.”

Below them in the flooded passages, Mazu moved on. Her salvation of those men had been a matter of mere chance. She had been following the waterways in pursuit of Quetzalcoatl’s army and arrived just in time to sense the desperate cries of the drowning Greeks. She hadn’t been in the rescue business for years, but now that she had exercised those dormant powers she felt rewarded with new strength. Breaking the chain had been easy. As she came upon two monsters, she wondered if her strength would stand their test.

She moved effortlessly toward them through the flooded chambers of the pits. The pink luminescence of one giant creature lit her way with its muted glow. She had never seen such a thing in all her travels along the waters. It was not natural. Mazu discerned immediately that its presence here was no accident. Nor was the diversion of the tributaries of the Styx River that she had fortunately followed here. She floated right up to the rear of the thing’s shelled body which was blocking a corridor and holding most of the intruding waters back. Unable to determine if there were innocents on the other side of the crab creatures that would be imperiled by the water, Mazu decided that trying to move the monster was too much of a risk. The safest way around was to again merge with the waters. Her beautiful robes disappeared as she liquefied and streamed between vibrating fins and spiny legs. She emerged safely on the opposite side in quickly rising floodwaters. Mazu reassembled and floated toward a great cell. To her surprise, she recognized its occupant from the drawing she had seen Topiltzin create. It was the beast.

The red and pink intruder was chewing on the bars of the cell with nasty, beakish teeth, while the beast paddled awkwardly to stay afloat in its flooded prison, howling in distress. Mazu wasn’t sure what to do. Perhaps it would be best to let the beast drown. That would certainly end the fighting over it. But she knew it had some connection to Aavi and to let it perish ignorantly could bring the sweet girl harm. Mazu heard a wrenching creak as the shelled monster managed to pry a section of bars from the stone wall. She needed to decide quickly what to do.

“I see no reason not to help you both,” she said. “It seems a balanced and reasonable path.”

Moving over to the part of the wall now missing its bars, Mazu began to strike it repeatedly with her staff. With each blow, a little more of the stone came free, falling at her feet and disappearing into the waters. The shelled creature continued its intent attack, pulling more of the bars out until their combined efforts broke open a gap large enough for the beast to swim through. As the beast lunged for freedom, the red monster tried to pursue, but Mazu turned on it, striking its underbelly hard with the butt of her staff before water-merging to avoid retaliatory strikes of its great claws. She transformed from solid to liquid several times to attack the thing, keeping it busy while Aavi’s beast escaped. The blows of her staff against the great shell sounded through the pits like the beat of a giant war drum.

Despite her earlier surge of renewed power, Mazu now felt herself weakening. She had given the beast as much of a head start as she could. Turning to water one last time, she flowed away from the giant clawed creature in the direction the beast had gone. She emerged in a large chamber above the pits. Pieces of battle machines were knocked over near a broken wall. Mazu noted the trail of giant wet footprints that led to the hole. The beast had found its way out of the fortress.
 
Mazu was uncertain if she had just made things worse, rather than better.

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As the fighting dragged on, the soldiers of Olympia discovered that their defensive advantage might ultimately be no match for the number of enemies arrayed against them. Even with the help of their gods, the Greeks were steadily beaten back and isolated from other units to prevent regrouping.
 
Zephyrus had done his best to help the soldiers beset by the Egyptians, but once the enemy reached the fortress walls his assistance was limited. Any use of his tempestuous powers would only blow the Greek defenders away from or over their ramparts. So during the night, he had turned away from the fortress and spent the dark hours damaging what still stood more distant from the fort. He had stormed rows of chariots, blowing the shoddier ones to bits. The resurrected mummies in charge of them could not be killed, but they could be broken. Those who remained intact enough set about righting their chariots, while those whose limbs had been ripped off by the wind wriggled about uselessly on the ground.

When dawn began to light the sky, Zephyrus spotted other targets. The Egyptian’s supply caravan was ripe for disruption. He clenched his fists, rubbing his rings together to prepare lightning charges. He swept in, dodging among the carts to tag Set’s undead servants, attacking them with disrupting shocks. He let the living men who ran get away. Zephyrus didn’t really like killing humans, and this seemed a fair compromise.

With the supply caravan in chaos, he considered whom to bother next. Spotting movement on the fringes of the woods, he moved in that direction. Out of the trees came jackals. Zephyrus was puzzled at first. They looked like normal jackals traveling in packs. Then his eyes picked out the armored Egyptians holding the ends of mighty leashes, one man to a group of twenty jackals. Zeph laughed aloud. The Egyptians looked like they were out walking their dogs. He wished Eros was here to see the strange sight and flew in for a closer look.

The jackal handlers arranged themselves in a wide line which faced the opposite end of the plain where half the remaining Greek infantry were gaining ground against the Mayans. Steadily they advanced toward that engagement as Zephyrus followed them overhead. The jackals were guided in an arc which put them at the rear of the Greeks. Zephyrus cursed, realizing that his people were now encircled and that he may have waited too long to attack. A blustery assault now would just make things harder for the Greeks. As he wondered what to do he heard a jackal handler cry out a command. All the leash-holders struck flints against the chains restraining their jackals. Sparks crackled along the links and down each lead, sizzling into the jackals’ fur and setting them ablaze.

The handlers dropped their leashes and retreated, while their animals took their true forms. These were deadly fire jackals, beasts whose bodies turned to living flame. The dusty grass began to burn under the press of their paws and a dense wall of smoke rose in their wake as they charged toward the Greeks.

Zephyrus grinned. He had been wrong. This job was made for him. It was time for a downpour.

*
       
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*

Eros was exhausted. The barrage of battlefield passions fell as thickly upon him as arrows from the fortress rained upon Set’s army. The emotions struck him in great waves.
 
Triumph, bloodlust, fear, and hatred waged their own war for supremacy in his senses. To avoid being swept up in any one tide, Eros had retreated to a far exterior wall of the fortress where only corpses from an earlier skirmish lay.

He walked among the quiet dead, an equal scattering of Greeks and Mayans. Some of them lay in positions of perverse embrace. A Mayan’s arms still clutched a Greek’s shoulders, the Greek’s blade buried to its hilt in the feathered warrior’s gut. The fingers of a Mayan felled by arrows gripped the ankle of a Greek whose skull had been bashed by a club. Around them all, the flies were already arriving. Eros watched the insects flit toward the most promising gore, landing upon contorted faces like brief, soft kisses.

He lifted his gaze from the bodies and turned it to the sky.
 
Eros watched Zephyrus dive toward a portion of the Egyptian army on the plain where fires were raging. Soon all was smoke and vapor as Zephyrus stirred a rainstorm and Eros could no longer see him. He looked forward to a time when he could hear Zeph tell his battle stories over never-emptying cups of wine in the Seven Hills. He supposed that was something worth fighting for.

The voices of priests on the wall above him drifted to his ears. Eros was reminded of the conversation he had overheard on the City balcony, but these carried far more dire news.

“It matters not who freed it,” Panos snarled, cutting off discussion among his group of warrior priests. “No one is going to sneak off to look for that traitor. The beast has to be recaptured! Do any of you dare shirk this duty at the cost of failing Ares?”

Eros, alarmed by news of the beast’s escape, took several steps away from the wall to call up to Panos. “Priest! I will help you find it!”

Panos rushed to the edge of the wall to look down at Eros. He made a gesture of agreement and respect before turning to bark more orders to his men. “Equip those archers with our special arrows! Get them on this wall, now!”

As the priests and the archers they dragged from other positions milled about above him, Eros took to the air. He stayed low, having no desire to draw attention to himself as a target. He didn’t necessarily need to see the beast to find it. He need only pinpoint emotions like those of a freed prisoner - and yes, there, near a crevasse that had split the earth - he felt eager jubilation. He also felt a thread of hunger, but he tried not to think about it.

“Watch that winged god!” Panos commanded. “He will signal.” Panos shoved a few of the archers who weren’t standing exactly where he wanted them into different positions.

“He’s found something!” Even Panos’s most nearsighted priest could see Eros frantically waving and pointing at the crack in the ground, and he called out the alert. The archers quickly set the magical caging arrows into their bows and prepared to fire.

“What about the infantry?” one of the archers dared ask. A squad was running near the crevasse on their way to reinforce some other front.

“Ignore them,” Panos said. “Just pen that beast. I don’t care if you ensnare the entire army too.” The archers exchanged nervous looks, disturbed by that command. Before they could protest it, they were abruptly shocked into action.

“It’s coming out!” cried the squinting priest, who could just barely make out a large form wiggling from the earth.