Shadows on the Aegean (80 page)

Cheftu’s glance slid across the mosaic ground, past the well, to the sea. “The sea is so close.” He swallowed audibly. “The
island is sinking. See the trees?” They stood in cubits of water. Waves lapped at the far edge of the mosaic pattern, mere
cubits from where they stood. The tip of a hill was just vanishing beneath the waves. “How long do we have before we’re immersed?”
she asked.

He looked up at the sky, trying to see through the ash and haze that covered the sun like a veil, leaving them shrouded in
half-light. Chloe forgot everything when she looked down at the stone-covered ground. A mosaic.

It was not Minoan work—that was a no-brainer. The design was less stylized. It appeared to be a chart of sorts. Chloe looked
more closely. Two fish, together. A ram, a bull, human twins. She searched through her memories of art history. They were
familiar, but these weren’t depictions she’d seen in class. She’d seen this in person, not on a slide.

She halted, then counted the symbols. Twelve. “Holy shit,” she hissed. It had been a while since she’d seen a daily paper,
but it looked like a zodiac.

“What is it, beloved?” Cheftu asked.

“I’ve seen this mosaic before.” Her scratchy voice rose in excitement. “In
Israel
. This one must be thousands of years older than the Israeli version. Why would a piece of Hebrew artwork be on this island?”
she asked.

The Voice, the one she’d heard only a few times, whispered to her heart.
Trust
. The hazy light cast the lintel’s shadow over Cheftu.

The alcove in Egypt, the cave on Caphtor, and now this sinking island. Chloe wondered if around midnight the moon’s shadow
would move to the goat—Capricorn—the sign for both of their December 23 birthdays. She shivered. If they were here, and Aztlan
was gone, was God going to rescue them? Was it a year later? Would the door open tonight?

Would they step through the gateway in time?

Chloe and Cheftu sat side by side, watching the lintel in fear it would disappear if they turned away. If they could glimpse
the sky, Chloe was certain they would see celestial bodies drawing into alignment.

Grapes and oregano had been their dinner. Not quite gourmet, but better than sand, the only other option. Cheftu had dragged
her to the well, and they’d both washed and drunk until Chloe thought “marking” would be no challenge at all.

The bottom-line question was why.

Sitting here was worse than waiting in an airport. Chloe clenched Cheftu’s hand. They had seen and done so much, but why?
She turned to him. “What was the point?”

“Of Atlantis?”

“Of us here,” she said. “Why bring modern people to this ancient world?”

He shrugged.

“Was it to help with the illness?”

“I cannot see that, since everyone died.”

“What about the elixir?” she asked.

“Only three of us have taken it. Since I destroyed the disk that bore the formula, there is no way to pass it on. The illness
and the cure are gone forever.”

What if we were supposed to keep the disk? she thought to herself. “We didn’t save anyone.”

“We saved a few, Chloe. We did all we could do. We are not asked more.”

She picked at the ground in silence. “What about the stones? What are they? Could they have been the point?”

Above them gray haze was melting beneath starlight and a half-moon. Cheftu sighed, then answered slowly, “The stones are Hebrew
oracular stones. The Hebrew high priest used them to communicate with God.”

“Easier than mere prayer,” Chloe observed. “Why here, though?”

“These people predated the Israelites, but they worshiped the One God.”

“Until they started in with the bulls,” she said.

“Aye. Every nation has fallen away, though, Chloe. Even the Israelites themselves did. God forgave and forgave—” His words
stopped as the shadow from the lintel became clearer.

It seemed to be growing brighter around them, a rosy glow. Was the lintel itself glowing? They crawled farther inland, onto
the mosaic, beneath the archway. Chloe grabbed Cheftu’s hand. “It must be the twenty-third of December.”

“Aye.”

The moon-cast shadow was moving, crossing the stones one at a time, shifting to the goat sign. They watched it, mesmerized.
Finally Cheftu stood up, tugging her with him. Chloe fought the urge to giggle. Her husband wore only a belt around his waist,
the two stones tucked on either side of his body. With his unbound hair waving over his shoulders and back, he looked as though
he’d been lifted from the cover of a lurid novel. She, on the other hand, looked like a witch who’d been yanked from a burning
pyre. Cheftu smiled as though he could read her thoughts.

He kissed her gently. She felt him lace his fingers with hers and opened her eyes. Water splashed up onto their calves. Time
was almost gone.

Her husband pulled her closer, backing up until they were standing on the mosaic goat, its horns tinted with gold. They held
each other, and she felt his heart pounding in his throat.

The water beat against the island. They were either going down or going somewhere else. The bases of the archway were long
submerged, and the glow from the lintel reflected on the wave-soaked rocks. The water surrounded them now, and she didn’t
know if she felt his trembling or hers.

Cheftu stepped away, holding her at arm’s length. He reached down, grabbed a broken shell from beneath the water, and scraped
it across his palm. Blood beaded up black on his skin. He rubbed his lips with it and then hers.

The Aztlantu vow. The blood vow.

He spoke slowly, his English broken and thick. Chloe felt her eyes fill with tears. His gaze was intense, seeing through her,
past a wreck of flesh and bone to her immutable soul. “We are entrusted with the life and welfare of each other. My blood
is yours, yours is mine. I seek to love and cherish you all my days, in whatever world we live.”

He kissed her, and Chloe tasted the hot silk that was his tongue, the copper liquid that was his life. “I love you,” she whispered.
“I’ll be with you anywhere.”

He clasped her tightly, whispering into her ear, “Dear God, how I feared you’d never say those words.” His hands were trembling
as he touched her wounded body. “Hold on to me. Don’t let go.”

She caressed his cheek, looking into his eyes. “I won’t leave you. I vow it.”

He closed his eyes, tears streaking the ash on his face. The one request he’d made: that she stay with him. She’d taken so
long to answer. “We’ll be together,” Cheftu said, opening his eyes to stare into hers. “I promise. I will travel anywhere
to find you, any time.”

Oh God, they might not travel together. He realized it, too. Chloe whispered, “I promise, too.”

The water was now to their waists. The island would be submerged in a matter of hours. They held each other’s hands tightly,
memorizing each other’s images.

It happened suddenly. The familiar wind whipped around her and Chloe felt herself pushed, her battered fingers melting away
from Cheftu’s unscarred hand. Instead of water, she felt only space, and then a psychic roar as she was transformed from flesh
to pure energy, lost in the cacophony of mixed senses.

Lost from Cheftu.

Help me keep my vow, she prayed.

C
HEFTU WOKE WITH WAVES WASHING
over his legs. The water was brisk and he sat up, shaking his head to clear it. Braced on his elbows, he looked around. The
patch of ground he sat on was not big enough to be called an island, and there wasn’t a jot of land anywhere else in sight.

“Chloe?” he called.

The water stirred. Grimacing and groaning, a woman pulled herself onto the islet. “I am thrice damned and beloved of Set,”
she cursed.

Cheftu’s blood iced over. The woman in Sibylla’s body looked up. Her brown eyes fixed on him, then narrowed. Her smile broad,
her voice seductively sweet,
“Haii
, Cheftu, we meet again,” she said.

Mon Dieu!
RaEmhetepet! Cheftu recoiled, covering himself. If she were here, where was Chloe? He noticed the water was clear, the sky
was bright, the ash had vanished. He had traveled. The islet on which they sat was tiny, but not underwater. The lintel was
gone. Where had RaEm come from? “How—” He choked on his words. “How did you get here?”

Horrified, RaEm surveyed her new body, the body that had survived the eruption of Aztlan. “I had made love with Phaemon—”

“Phaemon? Phaemon was with you?”

“Aye, the soldier who was my lover.” She licked her cracked lips and shifted her gaze. “The night I was transferred from our
Egypt to that hell of the future, I had determined to rid myself of Phaemon. I was full with his child, and the fool thought
I would leave Egypt to play wife and mother.” She laughed, and Cheftu forced himself not to wince. How could he have mistaken
Chloe for RaEm, even for a heartbeat? “While he was intimately occupied, I struck him.”

“You were coupling with him and you slapped him?”

“Nay. I took a blade to his back.”

“By the gods, RaEm!”

She shrugged. “We fought somewhat, then rolled beneath the archway to HatHor.” Her gaze met his. “Then we began the descent
into hell. We fought again when we awoke in the chamber, the same room, many years beyond what we had ever fathomed. I fled,
hid in the catacombs beneath the Temple in Karnak. Phaemon recovered.” Again she shrugged. “Eventually we made our peace.”

“How did you get here?”

“I was walking in the desert close to our campsite. I stepped into a hollow beside the monolith and found myself sucked in
by a mighty wind, awakening here.’

The wind blew coldly across them, and Cheftu was reminded that it was winter, that they were stranded in the middle of an
unsailable sea. No ships would chance crossing the Aegean or Mediterranean before spring.
Mon Dieu!
He touched the stones tucked in at his waist for reassurance. At least they were safe. Surely it was not his destiny that
he die here?

“While I was Chloe I had the appearance of a
kheft
,” RaEm said. She picked up a fragile piece of hair still attached to her burned scalp. “At least here I am black haired,
as a woman should be.”

Cheftu rose to his feet, suddenly trembling and sick to his stomach. RaEm had stepped into Sibylla’s body, where Chloe had
been. Sibylla’s spirit had been left in the cave when Chloe had first “arrived.” If Chloe weren’t here, and RaEm was … then
was Chloe in her own time? In her own body?

Foam and mist coated him, and he shivered, turning his back on RaEm, looking across the water. The empire that had once stretched
from horizon to horizon was gone, the islands all sunk beneath the sea’s waves. “Where are we, Cheftu?” RaEm said. “Why am
I here? What happened to this body that my
ka
now inhabits?”

He quoted Plato:
“ ‘There occurred violent earthquakes and floods, and in a single day and night of misfortune the island of Atlantis disappeared
into the depths of the sea.’ ”

He ignored RaEm’s complaints, smiling in spite of himself at her language. She spoke in a bizarre mixture of ancient Egyptian
and Chloe’s American.

“So where are you, my love?” he whispered to the waves. “What body holds you? What time is now your home? When will I see
you?” The words were carried by the wind over the sea. “Remember your vow, Chloe. Together. We will be together, again.”

E
NUMERATING THE DETAILS
used in
Shadows on the Aegean
would fill another book. Essentially, the Aztlantu are a cross between Plato’s Atlantis and what is known of the missing
Minoans.

Plato describes Atlantis as a mountainous water-and-earth-ringed island. Volcanologists have concluded that the island of
Santorini, pre-1500 B.C.E., was indeed ringed with water and land. What is today a crescent-shaped bay was then a shallow
lagoon. Excavations at Akrotiri (Prostatevo) show us multilevel dwellings made from the black-, red-, and saffron-colored
stone found on the island. Plato speaks of hot and cold running water, a geologic possibility in a volcanic environment. Excavations
show pipes and sewer systems within Minoan enclaves.

From whence did these Minoans come? As suggested by my imagination, they are descendants of one of Noah’s grandsons. I was
startled to unearth a theory that agreed with my fictional premise. A Byzantine cartographer, Cosmos Indicopleustes, suggested
that Noah was Atlantis’s founding father. The ancient known world has been divided by the tribes who descended from these
biblical characters. Javan (Iavan), son of Japheth, son of Noah, historically populated the eastern Mediterranean islands
of Crete and Greece. Cosmos thought that Plato’s account of Atlantis was originally Mosaic tradition. He suggested that Atlantis
was the land of the ten generations of Noah and was in the east. Followers of this theory from the 1570s misread Atlantis
into the Pentateuch as a part of biblical history.

The Urim and Thummim are virtually unresearchable, except through legend and the Book of Mormon. In a story preceding Moses,
this was no help. However, I wanted to place Aztlan in a historical context, so I turned to Egypt. Recent Egyptological studies
reveal that Joseph may have lived in the same time period that I placed Atlantis. These same studies show that a long period
of famine did indeed take place during the reign of Senwosret III, and that it was caused by exceptionally high inundations.
In a country as gingerly ecologically balanced as Egypt, a few inches’ difference in the flood level can spell disaster.