Sunrise on the Mediterranean (2 page)

“She is beautiful as benefits thee. Take her, Dagon—”
The chorus continued as I shrieked, then inhaled, desperately forcing myself to not fight off my pseudorescuers. Some factoid
in my military training reminded me that more people drowned while being rescued.
Don’t struggle, Chloe. Don’t.
I was coughing up water, my eyes streaming, blurring the world around me.

Arms grabbed me as I was going under for the third time. A hand covered my mouth, another voice crooned for me to be quiet
and still, they had caught me so that I could be honored. I didn’t want to be honored, I wanted to be free!

It took every ounce of effort not to scream as they pulled my head again, using my hair as a handle. Then they grasped me
around the elbows and hefted me into the canoe.

“Ha der-kay-toe glows with the beauty of Lord Dagon’s love,”
they sang. The vibrations of landing hard on the wood resonated through my body, knocked the wind out of me, left me motionless
for a moment. I couldn’t see because my hair, wet and heavy, covered my face.

“HaDerkato delights the heart of the Lord of Corn.”
I coughed up more water, spewing it through the—net?—I was caught in. I was outraged. I was snared in a net? Like a fish?
“Dagon, Master of the Sea …”
I fought to catch my breath. I twisted within my bonds, then stopped for a moment. Nearly drowning was hard work. I was exhausted.

I sneezed.

“HaDerkato blesses us,”
they said.
“Lord Dagon embraces her.”
Quickly I did a body inventory. Everything seemed to work—arms, legs, torso, neck. Though my head felt disconnected, still
I understood the words of the … sailors?

“Dagon, Lord of Corn, this gift we bring to thee… .”

Daybreak had turned the sky blue, with misty clouds above us. Through squinted eyes I saw that I was dumped in the back of
the canoe—but it wasn’t really a canoe, it was more like a skiff—and I was lying across a plank in the back, my feet trailing
an inch above the water. Strapped as I was in the net, I saw only my legs, the sky, and the odd sandaled foot.

Sandals, dresses on men.

“We implore thee to accept this propitiation.”

My eyes popped open at that.

“She’s waking!” someone shouted.

“Where is her tail?” another male voice asked.

“Get her before she returns!” The net was ripped off, my wrists and ankles tied, despite my silent struggling.

Too much of a battle and I would find myself overboard, definitely drowning. “Don’t look in her eyes,” one of them said. I
opened my mouth to scream.

“Silence her before she calls to Dagon,” someone said. They gagged me with salty rags.

“Keep your ears blocked, beware of her gaze!” said another, the chanting to Dagon uninterrupted throughout.

“Why does she have legs?” one of them asked. “As a consort of Dagon, should she not have a flipper, or fins, or a tail?”

A tail? I stopped struggling and trying to gnaw through my gag, I looked around, wincing as the gag tugged at my hair. I saw
them, upside down.

Men in dresses, colored and embroidered dresses with sandals. Short hair. Beards. Swords at their sides.

Okay, men in dresses. However, my mental processes didn’t say, “Okay,” they said, “
B’seder.”
Were they equivalent?

“Dagon, Progenitor of the Fields …”

Who was that? Where was Cheftu, my beloved husband, the reason I was here to begin with? I was here with men in dresses. I
sneezed—no mean trick with a gag—then looked up again, bewildered.

The sky was suddenly tinted red; when I looked down at my legs, the water beyond them, it was also red. Then I realized my
hair, which was framing everything I saw, was red.

“Dagon, Rapist of the Rivers, creator of the sea-maids …”

My hair was red?

My world rocked, canted at a definite forty-five-degree angle. My hair was red! Omigod.

A shudder coursed through me as I tried to look at my clothes, at my body. Then I felt them—signs of the twentieth century
in this obviously ancient world: the rayon miniskirt drying in the December breeze, the edge of a pushup bra digging into
my ribs. Straps around my ankles attached to a ridiculous pair of sandals. The edge of a Day-Glo necklace gleamed spectrally
in the morning light.

Around my neck! On
my
body!

I forced myself to breathe slowly, tried to still the racing of my pulse. I was a redhead with parchment pale skin— again—dressed
like a cheap hooker. And only
my
thoughts were in my brain!

Another Dagon verse. Dagon. Dagon. A king? A god? A priest? I was drawing total blanks. Fear bottled in my throat.

Where was Cheftu?

The skiff began cutting through the water at a fast clip. I get the world’s worst motion sickness on small vessels. Being
petrified didn’t help my stomach, either. Dagon’s praises continued, like Muzak. I took a firm grip on my mind.

No Cheftu, and you’re a redhead: the rules have changed. I bit back panic again and reasoned with myself. One, you woke up
in the Mediterranean. Literally
in
the Mediterranean. Then it struck me: They hadn’t been surprised to find me, they’d apparently been looking for me.

“Dagon, Showerer of the Plains, thy—”

Dagon. Dagon. My thoughts derailed as we pulled up to a big ship, complete with sails, oars, and cast of hundreds. More men
in dresses. More Dagon verses. I’d been rescued by some type of sailor. An ancient sailor. I was thrown over a man’s shoulder
like a catch of tuna, and I bumped against him as he braced himself in the skiff. My head was pounding with all the blood
flowing to it. After a few shouts, a rope was thrown down.

“Is
haDerkato
secure?” one of them asked.

The oaf carrying me patted my thigh and shouted back,
“Ken!
She is secure, but if she falls,
haYam
will provide another.”

The muscles beneath my stomach shifted as the man began climbing up the rope hand over hand. “You are a weighty goddess,
haDerkato
,” he huffed.

I had gone stiff as a board to stay over his shoulder: he certainly wasn’t holding me! I tensed my legs and tried desperately
to keep from swinging out. He grunted and groaned as he pulled us up the ship’s side. Beneath me, the sea, the sailors, and
the boat grew smaller and smaller. Suddenly a cold breeze blew across me.

“Watch out for her gaze,” the climber gasped out as he tossed me down on yet another wooden deck.

When next I opened my eyes, they were grouped around me. Men in dresses, with hairy knees and fish cologne.

“HaDerkato,”
one of them said slowly, as if speaking to a foreigner. “Welcome aboard
Dawn’s Battle.”

I insulted his heritage beneath my gag; my head was killing me.

“She curses you,” one of them said.

I looked at him immediately and they all stepped back, averting their eyes.

What the hell was going on? “Where’s her tail?” one of them whispered, staring at my bare white legs. Thanks to my streetwalker
attire, there was plenty to see. Why was everyone concerned about my tail? How many people actually had—

Oh, duh, I thought. They pulled me from the sea, they are scared of my voice, they think I’m a mermaid? I couldn’t help it;
I started laughing, drooling around my gag as I realized they thought I was a sea siren. I doubled over, howling, deaf to
their reactions.

A mermaid? Oh, this was rich. Priestesses and oracles I have been. Never been a mermaid before.

Then I sobered.

Why were they pulling me out of the sea, and who was Dagon?

And what was this about propitiation?

As another verse of the Dagon song trickled through my understanding, I remembered. Before I stepped through the red sandstone
portal, its lintel inscribed with the words of passage, the words of my final prayer in 1996 were, “Please God, let me find
Cheftu. Give me everything I need, especially language, to be with him again.”

“Dagon, Lord of Corn and Sea …”
I understood! My body ran hot, then cold. So if that part of the prayer came true, then Cheftu was here? Somewhere?

With a shout, we set sail. Still trussed up like a Cornish hen, I watched the sails fill with wind. I heard the slow beat
of the timekeeper as the oars creaked and groaned, speeding up. Big ships, square sails, and men in dresses—it was all vaguely
familiar.

But who was Dagon?

The rhythm of the ship rocked me quietly, even though I was spinning with confusion and discomfort—gags are not comfortable.
Then I heard the whispers. They must have thought I was asleep.

“I don’t understand. Where is her tail?” one man hissed. “She only has it when she’s in the water. How else would Dagon be
able to stump her?”

The first man grunted, “Are you certain she is
ha
Find?” Although I’d never heard
ha
before today, somewhere between hearing it and understanding it, I learned that it was “the.” In this case the “the” was
a term of honor, as in “the Big Kahuna.”

“She answered to
haDerkato
, did she not? Besides, who else would be in the middle of
haYam
on the day of the Find, if not Dagon’s intended?”

Ha
, the big “the,” and
Yam? Yam
was sea. Again, the translation was taking place somewhere between my ear and my brain. This time the internal translator
wasn’t only explaining the words, but giving me a cultural context as well. To these people the Mediterranean needed no other
name, for there was no competition. It was the Sea.

“Look at her jewelry; do you think she is less than that? No one save the bride of the king of the seas would have such a
thing as that. It glows with the light of the moon.”

“Colorful, too,” the other man mused.

They must have been talking about my neon jewelry. I fought not to smile.

“She is very pretty,” the suspicious one said.
“Ken.”

I tried not to blush. “Pity she will die.”

What? “Ach
, well, the desires of Dagon.”
“B’seder.”

They walked away, discussing ropes, as I lay there trying to still my racing heart. Pity about me dying? What was going on?
I grappled against my bonds for a moment, irrationally trying to get free, though there was nowhere to go.

I opened my eyes when it got quiet and was surprised to see that it was dark, yet we were still sailing. Did these people
sail all night? Ancient Egyptians were notorious for tying up their ships at dusk, I knew this from personal experience. The
Nile was treacherous enough without compounding the problem with a lack of visibility. But the Egyptians didn’t have ships
like this.

A low buzz of activity came from over my shoulders and behind my back. The sailors were moving around the ship quickly, shouting
orders—drop sail, double time, then the anticipated drop anchor.

Stars were sprayed across the blackness of the night. The temperature had dropped too, so now I was freezing. The bonds I
wore were almost warming. I lay there shivering as the men ran to and fro. The sound of a skiff falling to the water below
startled me. Just seconds later I was hoisted across another man’s shoulder and carried down another rope ladder. I kept my
eyes closed. What was unnerving going up in daylight was petrifying going down in the dark with a sailor whose odor of alcohol
mingled disagreeably with his aroma of fish guts.

They stood in the skiff, sailing into the harbor. Consequently my first view of the city, this time, was upside down between
a set of hairy knees. Lights sprinkled the hills, lending the scene a sense of being 2-D, like a matte painting for a stage
production. Again blood rushed into my head, giving me a headache that throbbed in time with his step. Between my head pounding,
his bony shoulder digging into my stomach, and being in a small boat on a rocky sea,
upside down
, I felt way sick.

As the revolting taste of hot bile filled my mouth,
thump
, we were docked. I was handled with the tenderness of a ton of potatoes. I could barely hear the surrounding sailors and
merchants compliment the men who had captured me. My ears were ringing as I was dumped into the back of a cart. My hair once
again covered my face, and the smell and taste of near vomit stayed on my gag. I was lying on my side, unable to pull myself
upright. The cart moved slowly, dragging across rutted dirt paths. Cats, no surprise with our fishy odor, trailed us, swatting
at my hair hanging over the edge of the cart.

Cart.
Think, Chloe, you could be figuring out where you are.
Why the hell should that matter? I groused back at myself. Cheftu isn’t here, at least not yet, and I’m in my own body with
no mental tour guide to wherever I am. Moreover, I think I’m scheduled to be some kind of sacrifice.

The word
propitiation
haunted me. I’d spent too many summers attending vacation Bible school to not be nervous. Propitiation was compensating for
doing something wrong, trying to work your way back into someone’s good graces.