 
### Time Trance of the Gods

BOOK ONE

By Linda Talbot

Smashwords Edition

Copyright Linda Talbot ~ January 2013

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This book is a work of fiction and any resemblance to persons, living or dead, or places, events or locales is purely coincidental. The characters are from the author's imagination.

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Table of Contents

Time Trance of the Gods - Introduction

Aphrodite's Option

Transformation

The Empusae

Movements Of The Moon

The Matriarchy

The Sacrifice

Hecate

Renewal

Fool's Errand

London

Flight

The Ichor of Ilyus Benz

Luke the Fluke

Loss

Nemesis

Thalassaea

The Memory of Myth

About the author

Time Trance Of The Gods

Introduction

### The ancient gods are borne through time in this collection of stories based mostly on ancient myth. For what may have happened in the past could well have parallels in the present and be re-enacted with the influence of technology or some man-made catastrophe in the future.

### Aphrodite's Option

Transformation

Elias stirs. Opens his eyes. Strains against a low, unyielding light. Dimly he perceives blue hills, a surging sea. He lies on a beach, radically re-carved.

He strives to recall. A void. Painfully he finds his feet. His silk shift is sand-stained and torn.

He walked unsteadily towards the hills. To his left the mesmerised Aegean heaved. To his right, a road ran blackly. Silence, save for the sea. Where were the people? Why did the low light not change? Where was he? Who was he?

He reached the road, headed for the hills. His legs faltered but he made the squat white village. No one.

He peered into an interior. A couple lay, apparently asleep. He passed to the next house. A young woman sprawled on the floor. He entered, tentatively touched her. She was dead, with evidence of burning.

He went into other homes. All the inhabitants had been burned and were dead. How had he survived? As though in response, a low wind rose and cooled his fevered flesh.

Elias was gross. He fattened on the proceeds of narcotics, trading through a consistently expanding network, needing an increasing degree of surveillance.

He had lived in a neo-Classical fantasy with twenty rooms dedicated to specific indulgences, from the mixing of music on advanced technical devices and a selection of literary erotica, to a room filled with semi-precious stones, shaped by the elements into the suggestive and grotesque.

In the basement, furnished with Asian silks and custom built couches, he had kept his harem; seven women hand-picked from around the world for their sensuality, purity and compliance.

He had dressed in hand made luxury; after dark, in loose flowing robes of heavy Chinese silk, designed to slough off in sensuous folds as he approached the sexual bed.

He was inventive and insatiable, frequently bringing to the bed samples of the music he had personally mixed and selecting a passage of arousal from one of the books.

As the selected woman lay in readiness, he held the book high in his right hand, while his left began to trace her flesh.

And he devised sonorous spells of dominance. Standing some distance away, he recited these sexual incantations, probing the woman's eyes with his, like a mongoose mesmerising a snake. When he finally lowered himself, the woman simpered like a small beast on heat.

One woman - Kekashan - brought from India, was a trained temple dancer. For her he had small images of Priapus made in eighteen carat gold which he hung on a fine chain and placed ritually around her waist. As she danced, the figures bounced and jangled in endless anticipation.

For Liv, a towering blonde from Sweden, he had a flexible, fine mesh net made in sterling silver which slipped over her sun-bronzed limbs like a second skin. The denial of her flesh as he strove to penetrate the mesh drove him to a frenzy and he would climax in bloodied ecstasy.

Loanga, an acrobat from Africa, was smeared with perfume oils and released to slither through the shadows, Elias following her fragrance, but frustrated as she slid from his grasp, tumbling and ducking through the house, until curling of her own volition, in some dark corner, where, half crushed, he covered her.

Eleni from the Peloponnese, shrank from water, having almost drowned as a child. He buried her up to the neck in sand facing the oncoming tide, on the beach below the house. Tenderly Elias placed wet weed and pearl white shells in her splayed black hair.

As the sea encroached, he loosened the sand until Eleni could begin to wriggle upwards, panic-stricken and grasping Elias tightly about the neck. As her limbs worked towards the surface, he covered her, the sea lapping his legs, her sand-encrusted limbs harsh against his.

He regularly devised fresh titillations, drawn from literature and imagination. He took a constant range of drugs, measuring and regulating, to achieve the desired effect. His women were given drugs only as rigorously rationed rewards for some particular act of excess or humiliation.

He was closely acquainted with the gods. He felt their presence as he walked the shore and watched the semen of Uranus flowing at his feet.

He saw Europa on the bull in the field by the rutted river bed and Zeus as the weird white swan rearing, its wings wide as clouds, to cover Leda shivering in the sand.

He understood primeval impetus; the elemental thrust and transformation, the unimpeded violations, ritually observed before man's prudish prohibitions.

Occasionally Nikos, a fellow manipulator of narcotics, joined Elias in the room built beyond the women's quarters. Nikos, refined and adept at embroidery, frequented clubs where his calling code, sewn in chain and Cretan stitch on his white silk shirt, was interpreted. It called for the callous, to which Elias inventively responded.

Elias passed beyond the village of inexplicable dead. Numbed and carelessly exposed, he walked into the sour light and for the first time, recognised the hills. He reached the great house. Its neo-Classical grace was unscathed. He began to recall.

He felt the presence of the dead as he entered. The silence was profound. The Persian carpets lay in place. The rich brown strata of the walnut table and chairs swam in the filtered light.

He passed to the library. The books stood in order on the shelves, their sensuality suspended. In the music room the equipment was unperturbed. The house was waiting.

Elias slowed and moved towards the bedroom. He hesitated at the half open door. Listened. With three fingers he pushed the door fully open.

The women were lying, lightly interlinked on the great bed, as though they had converged and clung in sudden terror.

Elias touched Eleni. She was stiff. With a tenderness he had never shown when they were alive, he touched the others, lingering in disbelief over each stiffened body, gazing into the open eyes and mechanically muttering an incantation. But the utterance fell on frozen ears. Like him, the women were not burned. Naked, they crystallised like unsullied porcelain. Elias summoned his pampered bulk to wrestle with the limbs, extricating one from another, laying each woman with arms close to her sides on the cold green tiles.

He sat on the redundant bed and gazed at the motionless flesh. He looked each woman squarely in the eye, striving to deduce in death, what he had overlooked in life. But Elias would never know how the women had felt, how each essentially differed from the other, the potential that had been brutalised by his demands.

He could not weep. He was sealed in shock. Eventually he rose and lifted Kekashan from the tiles that had intensified the coldness of her flesh.

He carried her along the hall lined with meticulous reproductions of Mughul miniatures to the pool that glimmered blue green among tree peonies and rose acacias. He slid her gently into the water. She floated, her black hair undulating like fine weed among the artificial islands planted with water lilies.

Elias watched her for a long time. His isolation crept like long fingers with nails of ice, from his guts to his traumatised mind. It held him as rigid as the lifeless women.

But it urged him at last to get up and heavily return along the hall. One by one, he carried the women to the pool and eased them into the water. Then he threw off his torn robe and slowly lowered himself.

He nudged the women into a shape like a blossoming flower which he eased across the pool until it spun with the momentum. But it bumped into the artificial islands and the flower disintegrated.

Elias splashed in deeper, striving to recreate the floating flower but the bodies drifted in arbitrary directions. At last he hauled them one by one from the water and laid them on the blue and gold tiles to form the letter E. They were, yet were no longer, his. He had determined their lives, had sustained and violated them.

Elias left the women lying in his name. He could not look back. He moved, unseeing, to the bed and lay numbed, in silence. He believed himself the only person left alive. Which god had decreed this death?

Eventually he wearily rose and went to the ground floor terrace overlooking the hills. They dimmed, as the light at last began to change. Darkness crept; a surreptitious balm, obliterating the abandoned world.

Elias, still naked, shivered. Then began to sweat. He sought a silk robe which cooled his fever. He sank into a deep damask chair and fitful forgetfulness. But at dawn he fully awoke. The fever had been succeeded by a creeping cold. And fear. It filtered through every pore.

He went again to the terrace bordered by Moroccan pots of roses. Elias fingered the petal of a rose and was assailed by connotations of the flesh. He plucked a large red bloom and breathed its essence. He dropped it in despair. The petals fell away and, as he watched, withered.

When he looked up and out towards the hills, touched by a livid and unnatural light, he saw a woman walking from their still black base. She was starkly white, black haired, her body strung with roses as red as the bloom now shrunken and brown on the ground.

The roses swung like pools of airborne blood. Some fell to lie on the rock-strewn earth. Her body bore smears of red. The roses' thorns caught her flesh as she walked and bled, the drops running into the red of the fallen petals.

One moment the woman neared, the next she seemed to be still at the mountains' base.

Elias left the terrace. He watched her fluctuating in her drift of petals. He willed her to walk towards him but she maintained her distance, until all the roses had floated from her flesh. The branch of thorns remained. Then fresh roses began to bloom between the thorns. They obscured the whiteness of her flesh, until only her face with its indistinguishable features and her long black hair, were visible.

Above the hills the light now was sallow, spawning illusion. Was the woman real? Had Elias formed her from vacuity? She wavered and as he drew near enough to distinguish the contours of her face, she began to dissolve. He hurried. Her hair flowed, dimmed and disappeared. He stood over a scatter of red rose petals, already withering.

Saul woke. He was in London; a city of still identifiable centuries in tact but with a burden of decomposing dead.

Saul saw his manuscript on the table; each page in place, each early Greek philosopher of his treatise, investigated, discussed, with a final evaluation. What of Thales, Alcmaeon and Zeno now? He had written a special section on Empedocles, exploring his claim that the universe was comprised of the four elements and influenced by love and strife, each periodically dominating the other. A perfect sphere formed under love, which was shattered when strife interceded. But life was eternal.

The curiosity and deductive powers of these philosophers, sustained for so long, would whirl for ever in the sphere where all words converge, unheard by humanity.

Saul moved, his limbs slothful, as though still subject to shock. He gathered his papers, clutching them close; his sole connection with a former existence. He knew, by some inexplicable instinct, the population was decimated.

He looked at his face, unburned, in the mirror. He took a chair onto the balcony by the bedroom, looked out over the rooftops, silent in the low light. St Paul's Cathedral - inveterate survivor - rose; rounded and aloof. Saul felt involuntary tears well. Insupportable isolation.

He slept and was compelled to wander the world, among man's artefacts that were evidence of time; three Minoan women, embodying verve, black hair coiled and strung with jewels in a fresco in Bronze Age Knossos, a family fishing and fowling, for eternity, astride their narrow boats on the teeming marsh in a tomb painting in western Thebes. A seventeenth century Mughal rug with peacocks and cranes, partridges and doves woven in wool of thirteen colours and the twelve symbol satin robe worn in nineteenth century China by Emperor Tao-kuang.

But these exquisite objects were evidence of wealth in the hands of a few, like those voted for by the majority who had died through some accident or secret, arbitrary decision. A nutron bomb?

And Saul passed through the common home, oppressed with practicality; personal pickings clumsily converging yet redolent with humanity's idiosyncrasies; warm witnesses to death.

He floated from the sinister silence, high above the city; its hysterical machinations suspended. The Bank of England, dour dealer with the national debt, government's needs and banker to the world, stood impotently irrelevant. The golden scales of justice weighed the air on the roof of the Old Bailey in Newgate Street. He could see through the walls of Guildhall, where the giants Gog and Magog were immutably sealed in time.

As he rose, the land wavered, the sullied light loosing illusion. Spires tilted. High rise blocks swam, their windows ethereal aspects of the sky. Only the Thames wove, unchanged, defying disintegration.

Saul opened eyes, unusually oppressed with sleep. He lay by a turbulent sea. Beyond the beach he saw pulsating hills and a prominent white house.

Stiffly, he found his feet, then saw his thesis lying in the sand, ragged yet still in order; the words of seeking and analysis legibly alive. He scooped it up.

Elias lay in the bedroom echoing with the sound of the sea. It might have been washing the walls of the great house, the breaking of the monumental waves thrown back like thunder by the black hills.

He did not return to the pool. The women lay in the pristine E, their flesh inexplicably preserved. Elias closed his eyes and visualised the woman strung with roses. He reached for her bleeding flesh and it fell like the rose petals, from his hands.

Without the means of manipulation he was impotent; ungainly hands and devious mind equally at a loss. Yet he needed neither food nor drink. He lived in a limbo unrelated to the physical.

Slowly, unbidden, white figures begin to move through his mind. They gain substance and detail; men and women, lost and vulnerably naked.

Elias focuses. He gathers them tightly, until flesh closes on flesh. Their confusion increases. Some grow inflamed and begin to obsessively unite.

Eagerly, Elias clutches the air, vicariously sharing their heightened emotion. He leaves the bed, striving to keep the men and women clearly in mind. But they fluctuate, in bizarre liaisons.

He went to the beach. At the back, near the redundant road stood great stacks of glistening white marble and black lava. He grasped a marble square. It was weightless. He laid it carefully on a flat piece of sand. He returned to lift a clean cut section of lava; feather light and demon dark which he placed next to the marble.

Within the hour he had laid an enormous board as though for a giant chess challenge on the empty beach. Instantly he felt a sense of order restored. Often he had played chess with Nikos. His mind had craved the discipline after dissipation. It moved through ingenuity yet was unable to universally speculate.

It had not occurred to Elias to question his existence, to wonder how and why the cosmos was created, although he had an empathy with monstrous myth; denying its authenticity yet instinctively identifying with the gods' excesses.

Now he feared the manipulating earth force. He needed to have control. He had mastered his limited world. He had looked no further than his degenerate domain. All that now remained lay in his head. Soluble men and women, beyond the jurisdiction of his will.

He looked at the board; blanks for potential play. Already Elias envisaged the creatures in his mind, reconstituted and coerced into a series of obligatory games. A contest for essential favours. He would offer the illusion of protection; his house, his body, an aura of privileged existence built on sand.

But the people who had been so actively intense, had vanished. Elias concentrated. Felt the need nagging his flesh. But his head swam blackly.

He stepped onto a marble square. Planted both feet firmly. Closed his eyes. He strove to recall the feel and odour of female flesh. But his skin was cold and uncomforted.

He moved onto a black square. A curious warmth rose, as though the earth beneath the lava still simmered. He passed from frigidity to warmth across the board, pausing to concentrate on the human form as though to will it into existence. Now he did not seek sensuality. Only the reassurance he was not alone. But the people he conjured had no substance.

Then he saw the woman strung with roses. She stood in statuesque indifference at the far end of the board. Her eyes were levelled at the sea. Her blood-streaked arms hung loosely at her sides.

She stepped onto the board, her feet suspended slightly above its surface. She moved from black to white, drops of blood staining the slabs. The petals fell and the roses grew again. Yet she drew no nearer. Elias started towards her. She dimmed. Disappeared. He sank on a cold marble slab, head in hands.

When he looked up he saw the distant figure of a man. He was clutching papers and walked as though intoxicated. Suddenly he paused and saw Elias in the centre of his chequer board.

Saul quickened. A pale sun filtered through the disorientating light, strengthened and flashed off the marble surfaces. Saul looked away and when he turned again, saw Elias slowly rise and walk towards him.

The heavy man paused at a distance. Assessed Saul. Came closer. He held out a hand.

"Elias Vandoris."

"Saul Usiskin." He too held out his hand. He recoiled from the flabbiness of the Greek's handshake but tried to smile into his apprehensive eyes.

"What has happened?" asked Saul.

Elias shook his head and raised his arms in a gesture of incomprehension. "Come." He turned and began to walk towards the house. Saul followed, wondering at the chequers, throwing sharp shards of light.

Elias offered no explanation but walked deliberately to the entrance of the house shimmering now in sun. Saul entered with him, was astounded by the opulence and oppressed by silence. Some unsavoury ghost lingered, tainting the unbridled luxury. Hints of femininity hung on the air. But there were no women.

"Do you live here alone?" asked Saul.

"Now, yes."

Elias seemed unwilling to elaborate, so Saul followed him onto the terrace where the roses turned to the sun. The chequer board was spread before the sea; an imposition of logical potential.

"Where are you from?" Elias spoke English with barely an accent.

"London. But I don't know how I got here," replied Saul, the absurdity of the situation amplified by words. He squinted at the dancing chequers.

"What's the purpose of that?" He pointed.

"I'm not sure," said Elias. "Do you play chess?"

"Yes. But not on that scale." Saul mustered a smile but sensed the Greek's confusion and fundamental fear.

"I'm writing a thesis on the early Greek philosophers," said Saul.

"What would they have made of this?" asked Elias.

Saul laughed. "Who knows? Perhaps the gods have at last intervened and have lost patience with mortality. After all we never did find a fundamental principle of life, did we? Perhaps we are condemned to an incomprehensible infinity. We came a long way from early Greek thought but as one problem was solved, along came another. The human brain in any case, is too limited to grasp even our own galaxy, let alone infinity.

"...Anaximander claimed that if all is infinite, one cannot have a principle because that imposes limits. Yet the infinite is ungenerated and indestructible and so is itself a principle."

Elias looked puzzled. Gazing too long at the stars had frightened him. His spirit was craven, not courageous. Had he lived at the time of the early philosophers he would have assiduously sacrificed and prayed.

"I think we were meant for sensuality," he ventured, "Come." Elias, abrupt and perceptibly darker as cloud covered the sun, strode with surprising alacrity, from the terrace. Saul followed, still clutching his thesis. Like Elias he had no need for sustenance. His head and feet were correspondingly light. He inhabited a void and seemed at a distance, to be witnessing a dream.

Elias led him to the library and indicated the rows of literary erotica. Saul drew a few books from the shelves, noting that even the covers were sensual; finest Morocco leather, thickly embossed satin, a pale vellum, heavily inscribed, the fingers induced to explore the flesh-like texture. Some contained graphic illustrations realised with refinement.

"You are fully qualified, I see." He turned to Elias. The man looked sad. Clearly he no longer had a raison d'etre. "If we survived, there may be others," said Saul. But he did not envisage Elias moving far from the house, haunted by feline ghosts.

The men returned to the terrace. "Why did I build that?" Elias pointed to the chequer board.

"More to the point - HOW did you build it? asked Saul, "You did it alone?"

"Yes, although it seemed to assemble itself. Why?"

Saul shuddered. The temperature had dropped but he was assailed too by trepidation. The chequers glowered now in the low light.

"There's something else." Elias paused.

"Yes?"

"A woman. Tormented by roses." He stopped, aware of the absurdity of what he had said. Saul looked at him askance. Clearly he was already affected by isolation.

Night fell, although the sky did not darken entirely. The humped hills were voluptuous. The men went inside. Elias picked up a copy of A Rebours by Huysmans and began to read aloud:

"Cette pièce où des glaces se faisaient écho et se renvoyaient à perte de vue, dans les murs, des enfilades de boudoirs roses, avait été célèbre parmi les filles qui se complaisaient à tremper leur nudité dans ce bain d'incarnat tiède qu'aromatisait l'odeur de menthe dégagée par le bois des meubles..."

Saul wondered at this irrelevant nostalgia for sensual nuance on an eerily abandoned Earth. He marvelled at man's ability to delude himself in face of the incomprehensible.

Eventually Elias's voice lost emphasis, trailed vaguely over words and ceased. He slept.

Saul walked softly from the room to explore the great house. He found the music room, hung with historic and ethnically bizarre instruments. An Aeolian harp stood by an open window, sighing eerily as its strings were touched by the breeze.

Saul moved on to a room where sensual fabrics were combined on couches, floor and walls; sable, satin, damask, Indian silk. He lay on a couch of red fox fur, his fingers exploring the surface of a silk carpet from Kashan.

But he could not sleep. The silence oppressed, while the feminine presences persisted. He got up and was compelled to walk down the hall lined with Mughal miniatures to the blue-green pool.

He saw the floating islands of water lilies. Then he saw the women by the pool; starkly white and laid in the shape of an E. Alarmed, he approached. He knelt, touched Eleni, felt her pulse, confirmed her death. He repeated this with each woman and wondered at their preservation.

Had Elias killed them? They bore no mark. Poison? But they had been his reason for existence.

Saul left the pool but could not locate the room of sensual fabrics. Each door now along the hall was locked. They were identical, virginal, concealing what? The hall continued. Now the walls were blank, accentuating the secrecy with a listening weight of silence. He could see a further blank wall at the end of the passage. But with each step, it drew no nearer.

The white woman, hung with roses, stepped from the dim limits of the passage. Saul paused; saw the blood running in narrow rivulets from her body. Her eyes looked above and beyond him.

A rose fell and fluttered on the marble floor, retreating as Saul approached. Mesmerised, he watched its petals fade, wither and disintegrate. When he looked up the woman had gone.

Shaken he turned, and in walking back, distance decreased. He was again in the room by the terrace. Elias sprawled on a silk covered couch. In his sleep, in repetitive order, he murmured the names of the dead women.

Saul sank into a brocade-covered chair and tried to sleep. Images of London, slowly disintegrating in silence, relentlessly surfaced. Yet he would not willingly have left the city. HOW had he left?

He picked up his thesis and clicked on a lily-shaped lamp. He read his analysis of Xenophanes, empathising with his belief that man cannot comprehend the cosmos, when he wrote:

"And the clear truth no man has seen nor will anyone know concerning the gods and about all the things of which I speak; for even if he should actually manage to say what was indeed the case, nevertheless he himself does not know it; but belief is found over all."

Including a belief in infinity; one that now seemed well founded scientifically, if science can encompass a barely graspable concept. This infinity might once have been considered changeless. Now we know better thought Saul.

Surely there were successive elements of change within a fundamental principle that was permanent? Parmenides claimed all was continuous. Had man caused the radical change that had overtaken the earth? Or had some cosmic pre-ordained or accidental incident occurred?

Saul found a pen still in his top pocket. He flipped to some blank sheets and began to speculate on how the early philosophers would have interpreted the event.

Empedocles, for instance, would have nodded sagely and, believing the earth consists of love and strife, concluded that strife had triumphed.

And what of Saul's transfer from London to Greece? What power had helped Elias build the chequer board? And why? And who was the rose-strung woman they had both seen? Had she appeared to Saul because Elias had conjured her image? Saul's eyes grew heavy. He slept.

At the meeting of three rough roads beyond the undulating hills, a dark woman stands. A bronze sandal glints in the light of a full moon. Three large dogs of no definable breed loom, motionless, beside her. Her face glows, as though lit from within. Her eyes move from left to right, scrutinising the white grit roads reaching vacantly into the ghostly scrub.

Saul woke three hours later to hear Elias on the terrace.

"Move two right!" he cried urgently.

Saul went to where the large man stood, dressed in a Japanese robe. He was looking at the empty chequer board. Light rain had fallen in the night and the board's surface glistened in a feeble sun.

"Move!" Elias repeated. He was oblivious of Saul. Saul touched his shoulder. Abruptly, Elias turned. He seemed disorientated.

"Who are you talking to?" Saul asked.

Elias looked back to the board. He saw a man and woman, flesh plucked by the early air, standing two squares apart, the woman on a lava, the man on a marble square.

Saul looked at the empty chequers and at Elias. "There's no one there," he said quietly. Elias looked aggrieved.

"But -" In his mind the couple grew. They shivered in the ineffectual sun and seemed to glimmer closer on the black and white board. But they remained apart; each an island of distinct sexuality, oblivious of the other.

Was it because one was a man? Had Elias only influence over women? As he gazed, applying every effort of will, the man began to change. His chest swelled into the breasts of a woman. His lower body altered.

The metamorphosed man looked at the other woman. Her head instinctively turned. Their eyes met. What passed between them was not intended by Elias. The woman who had been a man; indifferent and unco-operative, now extended a white arm to the other woman. She responded. The two stood, clasping hands, looking deeply into each other's eyes. The woman on the marble square moved two steps towards the woman on the lava. Complicity was established.

Helplessness immobilised Elias. His mouth hung open. His right arm was motionless in the air. Slowly the women turned and walked away from him. They drew closer, their arms sliding tentatively across each other's back.

Elias dropped his arm. He closed his mouth. But he still stared at the receding women, his flesh that had cajoled and outraged, frozen in disbelief.

Like a blind man, he let Saul ease him back into the room. He slumped; redundant and in retreat.

In dream, he walked through the rounded hills of Crete; maternal and world weary, denuded by boat builders and grazing goats. He heard the mellow goat bells and saw the beasts leap lithely along a slope's steep side; sure-footed shadows in the scrub. And the young goatherd mimicked his goats, until he leapt to the outer edge of the hillside to sit in pensive silhouette against the pale dawn light.

Elias had left the house of women to walk into the hills and wistfully watch this man whose days were constrained yet liberated. He was obliged to keep close to his goats, yet he walked on sun-steeped rock and gazed across the hills; his spirit deepening and drawing daily closer to the earth.

Elias was an only child. His father had been killed in the liberation of Athens in the second World War. His mother moved lugubriously through their rambling apartment in Heraklion. She was black-clad, over-protective, an unrelenting presence, loathe to let him out of her sight.

School would have been a release but even as a child, Elias was gross and was bullied. He dreamed of retaliation; of taking control of his life, even of controlling others. But his mother remained immutable, coercing him to constantly return her attentions.

He despised his reliance on her. And when her two sisters came to stay, the apartment shrank until Elias hyperventilated and had to lie still. This drew the women even more oppressively upon him.

At night, as he grew into his teens, he fantasised. He could not dispel the feminine; it entered every pore. The flabby flesh wrapped him in dream. He felt a feline weight imposing and insisting. He woke, flailing his arms and lying at the wrong end of the bed, as though trying to evade violation.

But as the time neared when he would take over the shipping business run for his late father by relatives, the dream changed.

By day, still dependant on his mother, in spite of swaggering as though with self sufficiency among friends, he was released at night from her ponderous presence.

Now he ran hands over women with firm breasts and skin with the finesse of silk. He took command, riding their lithe limbs, insisting on a succession of intricate moves which he crudely curtailed if the women expressed gratification. Now HE manipulated. The draining demand for affection and obedience, suppressing the spirit, was defied.

He proved an adequate if often lethargic manager, heavily reliant on his relatives' experience. He initiated a dangerous foray into the shifting of narcotics, protected by the reputable family name.

He made money, bought a small island and built the neo-Classical house. Steadily, his collections grew and he travelled extensively to hand-pick his women. Each believed herself his only choice. Her disillusioned outrage when she discovered otherwise, provided one of his prime pleasures.

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The Empusae

At the meeting of the ways, the three women part. The gossamer of lunar illusion, they each walk in different directions, their feet leaving no prints in the dust.

The three roads that had run round Elias's island, mysteriously move beneath the moon. They float and merge into a shining way striking through the black hills to halt abruptly at the chequer board on the beach. The women converge and walk abreast, their steps precisely matched. Each wears a bronze sandal on one foot. Their moon-struck hair lilts as they walk. Their loosely linked hands are long, with pale, tapering nails. They are silent but smile as though withholding a secret.

Within their ethereality, the feminine flesh ripens. The women sense masculinity in turmoil; a spirit deprived, dependant, yet denying feminine essence.

The women thrill, their silvered flesh plucked with the premonition of conquest. They reach the end of the road.

Elias woke suddenly. Anticipation and fear propelled him to the terrace. Sun struck the chequer board. Three women gleamed - silver shafts of fluctuating light on black lava squares. More figments of his disordered mind?

Elias watched, motionless. The women stepped forward, finding black squares with their small, half-sandalled feet. Elias shivered. Wanting, yet doubting them.

When he looked again, they were almost at the terrace. Their grey eyes disdainfully challenged his. Elias offered his hand. One by one they stepped among the roses. Elias did not ask who they were. He feared they would vanish. Their shimmering hands felt like flesh and now he saw they wore loose dresses of sheer fabric that flowed like water as they moved.

Saul still slept. Elias quietly led the women through the room to the lounge of luxurious fabrics. Sardonically, they smiled. They were not identical, yet moved as though synchronised.

Elias indicated couches. Graciously the women reclined, utterly at ease, loosely spreading bare arms, allowing their clothes to drift and reveal flawless limbs. For a long time Elias merely looked. He detected a trace of Japanese musk and sandalwood. He relished their hair undulating, as though in an invisible breeze, on pale shoulders. He followed the line of their extended legs but had to turn his eyes from the brilliance of the bronze sandals.

Eventually he motioned the nearest woman to come close. She smiled fully, lowering her eyes in mock modesty, gliding with unearthly grace from the couch.

She spread her legs and slid across Elias who shuddered and clasped her tightly at the waist. Seconds passed in elation; unprecedented sensation which swept, overwhelmed and rapidly receded. The woman was suddenly back on the couch, as though she had not stirred.

The second woman advanced and eased Elias onto the carpet where he was ridden by a sensual, light-limbed essence. This woman also rose and returned to her couch before he had recovered.

The third woman took his hot hand and led him to the Islamic arch at the end of the room where a wrought iron balcony flowed with oleanders.

This side of the house overlooked a steep-sided valley. The woman stood, looking down into its depths, while Elias closed in on her breathlessly from behind. When he opened his eyes, she too had extricated herself and returned to her couch.

Elias slumped onto the floor. He could not move his leaden limbs. His eyes closed. His mind swam with spent sensation, his strength sapped by a physical undertow. He tried to sit and abruptly fell back. On a second attempt he succeeded. Opened his eyes. The women had gone.

He clutched his head. Another delusion? Was his need for female flesh conjuring phantoms? Gasping for breath, he struggled to his feet and walked unsteadily back to the terrace room.

Saul was awake.

"Good God! What happened to you?" he said.

"Cursed women!" Elias exclaimed and related his experience.

"Where did they come from?" Saul queried. "Was there any clue to their identity?"

"There was something odd. Each wore only one sandal," said Elias.

Saul looked up sharply. They could not be! There was no way the manifestations of Hecate could have appeared as flesh and blood in the twenty first century. The catastrophe was breeding illusion.

Then he thought of the rose-hung woman. He could not relate her to myth but she seemed as improbable as Elias's seducers.

He saw Elias was sharing his speculation about the Empusae, the daughters of Hecate, who terrified travellers and could turn into bitches, cows or beautiful women who sapped the strength of men.

Could the disaster have released the ghosts of Greece? Since it had been assumed the myths were merely symbols of political and social events, they must be materialising in the men's minds.

"Do you know of Hecate's predecessor, Lilith, the Canaanite?" asked Saul. "She came to Greece from Palestine."

Elias shivered. He shook his head, clearly uninterested in knowing more. Still, neither man had need of food nor drink. Only sleep and for Elias, sensual satiation. But both needed air and went to the terrace. The chequers danced in a scintillating sun and fleetingly, three pale-bodied dogs passed purposefully across the furthest combination of squares. They were swallowed by light, then reappeared, moving in the opposite direction. Now their coats were sleekly black. Their heads were elegant, their necks collared with multi-coloured stones.

"They're bitches," murmured Elias, his observation of gender faultless even at that distance.

" Another form of Hecate's children?" Saul could barely believe he had said that.

"I want this settled," said Elias. He left the terrace, his Japanese robe flouncing like a sun-startled flag in his wake. He reached the chequers and, irate, flapped across the squares. But already the bitches had vanished.

Saul watched him turn and crumple as though relinquishing breath. He hurried to him.

"What's wrong?"

"I feel as though the life is being sucked out of me," gasped Elias. Saul helped him to his feet. "Those dogs were probably just strays. Our imaginations are getting the better of us," he said.

They returned to the terrace room. Saul sat deep in thought. Elias sprawled again on a couch and slept.

He is trapped in time past. Before recruiting his harem, he had known the dark-eyed daughter of Andreas, a shipping magnate from Thessalonika with whom he was obliged to do business. Elias had met him in Athens, staying at a quiet hotel cooled by cypresses. In the evening he walked among them; striving to resolve his repression. He had an overwhelming need for release with a woman, yet feared enslavement; the insistent attentions and expectations of his childhood.

At night he dreamed of pliant flesh and a flexible spirit. He saw the woman's face; the taut, unblemished skin yielding to him; an untutored mind waiting to be influenced. He woke alone.

Then one evening, as he passed soft ranks of oleanders that grew within the cypresses, he saw the woman enter the garden. He shivered with deja-vu. She might have stepped from his dream.

She wore her black hair loose and her apprehensive eyes were downcast, as though some silent revelation lay in the finely sifted shingle. She wore a white silk dress. Beneath, her long-limbed body was not yet at ease. She was ingenuous, unprepared.

Elias recognised Andreas's daughter, Ritsa. He approached. "Good evening," he ventured, "I'm Elias Vandoris, a friend of your father. May I buy you a drink?" She nodded but barely raised her eyes. They shook hands.

Elias seated her on the terrace, her back to the sea, so she was compelled to look at him as he spoke. Ritsa had finished her schooling yet retained a schoolgirl's uncertainties. She had no specific interests but accompanied her father on business trips. Her mother had died two years ago.

She was cloistered in the best hotels with occasional expeditions, chaperoned by Maria, an aunt who had cannily worked her way into her brother's schedule.

Elias spoke of his new house, of the changing sea, the blue-black hills and of Crete where he grew up.

Sensing Ritsa would recoil from worldly affairs, Elias spoke of the past; his discovery of Minoan civilisation; the haunted labyrinth of Knossos.

Ritsa was well informed but Elias, with his ability to fantasise, vividly recreated the myths. Ritsa was stirred by the maddened masculinity of the minotaur, the frivolity and sexual innuendo of the women who watched the bull leaping, and in awe of Talos, the bull-headed bronze servant given to Minos by Zeus to guard Crete. Was he one of the brazen race that sprang from ash trees? Or was he forged by Hephaestos, the smith god in Sardinia?

"He charged round Crete three times a day throwing rocks at foreign ships and three times a year visited the villages with the laws of Minos inscribed on bronze tablets," said Elias.

Ritsa moved closer, absorbed. "When the Sardinians tried to invade Crete, Talos walked into a fire and emerged, red hot. He laughed, embraced and killed the invaders. Some say this is where the expression "a Sardonic grin" comes from. Medea killed Talos by pulling out a bronze pin at the base of a single vein in his ankle. His life blood ran out."

Then abruptly, Elias said, "I can't take you to Crete but I could take you to my island."

"I'd like that," said Ritsa. But Elias knew that, without proposing marriage, he could not hope to see Ritsa alone. And the idea of commitment to a woman - even one as pliable as Ritsa - was abhorrent. But he wanted to take her to the Plaka and, drawing her close, dance to the sound of music redolent with virility and feminine compliance. He perceived that when responding to his lead, she would move with lithe continuity. He visualised her on the great cedar wood floor of his dancing room; a latter day Ariadne, her black hair flying on shoulders pale as the snow that seldom fell. But he could only escort her to the park.

Then he learned of Andreas's yacht anchored off Pireaus. She would be there as he negotiated with her father. There would be evenings of leisure, although access to her would be restricted.

His anticipation sharpened on hearing of the beach picnic planned by Andreas and his friends for the following week. He would extend his stay in Athens.

At sunset he joined Andreas and his companions on board the Calliope. He relished the cool gliding of silk on lightly tanned skin, the hint of attar of roses, the distancing artifice of bright-nailed hands raised in expressive exclamation.

The women were chosen for their faultless fine bone and ability to participate in, without dominating, a discussion. Elias barely acknowledged their masculine companions.

Ritsa appeared from below in a diaphanous shift depicting the sea. A blue-finned fish slithered as she moved, pink rimmed shells tumbled at the hem lilting just below her knees. Her aunt, in unpretentious beige, followed.

Ritsa smiled at him; the fast dropping sun turning her to gold. She sat by Elias as they sailed slowly to a deserted beach along the coast. The soft air rendered the party languid and sensually receptive. They stretched their sun-warmed limbs, drank steadily and dropped occasional comments that drifted inconsequentially on the wind.

They moored and tossed by dinghy to the beach. The crew returned for inflatable beds, cushions and food to barbecue on the sand. Elias reclined, having lost sight of Ritsa in the scramble ashore.

Then he saw her, standing alone by the pendulous overhang of a rock at the end of the beach. She tossed her black hair which lifted lightly in the breeze. She had kicked off her gold sandals and pleasurably worked her feet into the sand, gazing at the sun's red rim as it dropped in seconds below the horizon. There was a sudden chill of encroaching night.

Elias got up and wove through the people, animated now with wine. Ritsa turned, startled, as he spoke. She had not heard him approaching through the sand.

"What are you thinking?" he asked her.

"How sad it would be without the sun."

"Sad? We would perish," Elias pointed out, "Come, let's walk." He indicated a darkening path, leading over low cliff. They began to climb. Elias guided Ritsa, placing a hand under her elbow.

"What will you do with your life?" he asked.

"Marry, I suppose. Father is considering some young men but he wouldn't force me into marriage without my consent."

"I'm relieved to hear that."

"It's almost dark," said Ritsa and shivered.

"Yes. We can't go any further. Let's rest here." He moved his hand so it slipped, as though by chance, into hers. They sat beneath a gnarled olive. "You're very beautiful," said Elias, lightening his grasp. He turned to look at her Hellenic profile. She blushed.

Wary of alarming her, he disengaged his hand, paused, then slowly placed his arm around her shoulder. She did not flinch. He lightly caressed her skin.

"Do you think you could persuade your father to let us go out without Maria?"

"Oh no, I doubt it. But you can ask him if you like. He might add you to his list of eligible men."

Elias flinched and almost withdrew his arm. That was not his intention. "We'll see," he said simply.

He grazed his hand against her right breast and began to stroke. She stiffened. Then, lulled by sun and sea, let him continue. He placed his other hand on her left breast, easing aside the flimsy stuff of her dress. As though mesmerised, she did not stir. But as he laid her back in the dust and rolled resolutely on her, she screamed; the sound rending the night.

Abruptly Elias rolled off, found his feet and pulled her roughly up. "You stupid little bitch! Grow up!" He shook her and saw himself, as though from a distance; a stranger out of control.

Ritsa struggled from his grasp and whimpering, ran through the dark, back to the beach. Angry and apprehensive, Elias followed. He saw, by the flickering lantern light, Ritsa running to Andreas. Maria joined them. There was no way Elias could leave. He paused at the end of the beach.

Andreas came purposefully towards him. The blow was swift and in blackness, Elias fell. When he surfaced he was on board, the yacht drawing into harbour. The party was subdued.

Elias was ignored and left to stumble from the craft onto the quay. Briefly, he saw Ritsa walking away with Maria. Andreas cancelled their business contract and brought a case of attempted rape. Eventually, a messy and exorbitant out of court settlement was reached.

Elias woke, still exhausted. He felt an overriding sense of loss and a premonition of dark possession. Saul scrutinised him from across the room.

"Better?" he asked.

Elias shook his head. "Tell me about yourself," he said.

"Born in north London. Went to Cambridge. Read classics and philosophy. Now doing thesis on early Greek philosophers, especially Empedocles," said Saul.

"No, no, not a C.V. Tell me ABOUT yourself. Are you married?"

"Good god, no! Give me a chance. I've had women, of course, but no one special."

"Do you get on easily with them?"

"They vary. Some are easy. Others impossible. I don't pretend to understand female psychology."

"What about your mother?"

"She was remarkable. Very well read. Died three years ago - prematurely from cancer. Her chicken soup was superb. But she wasn't orthodox Jewish. Nor is dad. I wonder what happened to him - and the rest of the family."

Elias felt unable to discuss his mother. Her presence still weighed, like an airless August day, prohibiting expression.

"I lost my father when I was small. My uncles ran our shipping firm until I could take over. I'm the only child."

Saul summoned courage. "Do you know about the bodies by the swimming pool?" he asked.

Elias started. "When did you discover those?"

"Was it yesterday? I've lost track of time. I was looking round the house."

"That's how I found them," Elias lied. "After the disaster, I came to on the beach and when I got back to the house I saw them floating in the pool."

"But they're not decomposing," pointed out Saul.

"No. Something extraordinary has happened. What will become of us?"

Saul shrugged. "We must watch our imaginations. I think we have been hallucinating. I suppose we should leave the house and look for other survivors. Try to get to the mainland or Crete. Don't you want to look for your mother?"

"No," Elias said quietly.

"How far are we from Crete?" Saul persisted.

"Over a hundred miles," said Elias.

"You have a boat presumably?"

"Yes. Moored on the other side of the hill. But look at the sea. We couldn't put out on that."

While talking, the men had moved back to the terrace. The white-crested waves reared to break like thunder on the beach.

Elias returned to the room and slept again. Talking had further sapped his strength. Saul gazed bleakly at the chequer board. It lay, enigmatic and absurd, seeming by turn, to expand and contract. Then he noticed the road that had run up against the far end, had vanished. He went back inside.

Time was wayward. There were no clocks in the house. Elias wore an elaborate watch by Cartier that he never removed. But when Saul glanced at it, the hands had stopped at 5.30.

According to the sun, it must now be about midday, although it seemed barely an hour since early morning. Restless, Saul wandered back onto the terrace. No rain had fallen. The roses had not been watered yet they turned fresh faces to the sun. Saul picked one and fingered the soft surface. He felt instead smooth flesh and recalled the women he had known.

Rebecca, sentimentally Semitic and prone to coyness, rose before him like a wraith. She had been with him at university and had a perturbing lassitude. She had let him take her methodically through the motions of intimacy.

They had drifted apart without pain and Liza, who was not Jewish but was obsessed with the Cabbala, had replaced her. Her erratic behaviour had disorientated Saul who was striving to grasp philosophic logic. He could not sustain a rational discussion with her and as she progressively addled his mind, he gently discouraged her. Then decisively dismissed her.

His knowledge of the flesh had grown, touch by touch, until he perceived the subtle zones of sensitivity and could elicit gratification. Yet his mind was elsewhere. It moved beyond the flesh, reaching for universal abstractions and explanations. Eventually he ceased seeing women and became immersed in his thesis.

Elias woke and shuffled wearily to the terrace.

"Look!" Saul indicated the dark rock - overspill from the hills which seemed to have shifted closer to the house. The shape of the rocks had changed.

The men left the terrace, skirted the sand-blown chequer board and approached the hills. They sprawled in blue black strata. They might have been lifted and rearranged by a massive hand.

Elias reached and touched a swirling band of rock. Flesh tones spread, obliterating the blackness. He sniffed. Leaned closer. The rock smelt of feminine flesh. Saul watched, then smelt it too. Man and woman. He could detect both.

He looked at Elias and shrugged. As they continued to touch the rock, it yielded slightly. Alarmed they withdrew but were tempted to touch it again. Slowly, the rock began to pulsate; breathing and gradually forming into the head, shoulders and chest of a man.

Saul recalled the rock in mythology that unaccountably smelt of man. Was this another hallucination? The man continued to materialise. Imposing. His mouth unsmiling. His eyes gazed, as though through time, over the men's heads. His huge hands hung motionless by his sides.

Warily, the men stepped back. But the figure of fluid rock did not move. Beside him another form slowly emerged; identical and gazing with as much concentration, seawards.

The men were stunned, as eventually ten men took shape. They appeared to have sensibilities but did not stir. They might have been awaiting instructions.

Elias stepped forward and nudged one. Puzzled, the eyes lowered to look at him. Elias pulled at his arm and grunted, indicating he should step forward. The man did so, shakily in spite of his size. He held out both arms to Elias, who helped him gain balance and begin to walk. Saul helped another man and with Elias, soon mobilised all the figures, who stood rigidly in line, hands now motionless again at their sides. Their eyes shone; innocent, a little lost; anticipating, as at the world's dawn.

Saul thought of Prometheus, creating man from water and clay, and enraging Zeus by stealing fire which would give humanity rival power.

These men are figments of our mind, thought Saul. His thoughts winged through the unprecedented world they now inhabited; wondering and striving to grasp the magnitude of what had happened.

"Come!" Elias was not questioning the phenomenon. He indicated the men should follow him. They did. Stiff but unquestioning. Thoughtfully, Saul followed. The men walked in triangular formation. He pondered the numbers game played by Pythagoreans in the fifth century BC. There was the "tetractys; the magic group of four, consisting of the first four numbers which together add up to ten; the perfect number. In it lie musical ratios and from it a perfect triangle may be formed. Was the men's triangle significant? Again they skirted the chequer board. The men remained in the triangular shape.

Suddenly they turned and walked back to the board. Maintaining their formation they stepped onto it. It was then Elias realised there were only thirty two instead of sixty four squares. In their triangular formation two of the men straddled lava and marble.

"That's wrong. There can be no play like that!" Elias complained. Saul looked at him anxiously. Clearly he was unbalanced. "Does it matter?" he said quietly.

"Of course it matters. The game must be played." Elias tensed, his eyes too bright. Saul knew he was alone. This man's mind had been unhinged by events.

He watched helplessly as Elias shouted at the earthborn men, striving to rearrange them, so each fully occupied a square.

Unexpectedly the men responded to Elias. Each moved, seeking a full square but always two remained astride lava and marble.

Elias quivered with frustration. The men began to jostle and panic. They uttered faint cries. Saul tried to restrain Elias. "Come and lie down," he urged. But Elias persisted. He stared at the chequer board. The men who could not gain full squares had stopped struggling.

Elias sees women surreptitiously replacing them; black hair lengthening and gathering, like clouds of storm, to be drawn up high on their heads. Their necks lengthen too; narrow and porcelain pale. Slim shoulders slope. Firm breasts rise. Thighs and legs appear. Their flawless beauty is familiar.

"It's them!" Elias uttered and backed into the room.

"Who?" Saul looked and saw only the motionless earthen men. Elias stumbled. He was sweating. He heard the whisper of feminine feet and smelt women's flesh. He fled from the room.

"Elias!" Saul ran after him. He saw him disappear round a corner with panic induced speed. When Saul reached the turn in the passage, Elias had vanished. Saul sighed and sought the music room where, disconsolately, he toyed with the strange instruments.

Elias paused. The small feet were still pursuing. He looked behind. No one. The footsteps stopped. He continued, hurrying up a broad flight of marble stairs to the first floor. Here were rooms of archaeological finds, from remnants of Rome to the Middle East. Elias had also had some notable Greek pieces copied; the ingenuous clay birds from the Geometric cemetery of Tsikalario in Naxos and from Thera, a conical rhyton with spirals and rosettes. He slid onto the floor by a replica of Aphrodite, washed up on a northern beach in Rhodes. Momentarily, he thought she sighed.

He heard coquettish laughter by the door. Daring to look up he saw a young woman, naked except for a girdle of glittering stones, her eyes, the colour of rich earth, watching him with pity, then contempt.

He raised his hands in defence but the woman entered, treading lightly on white feet which were silent - the footsteps had been a manifestation of fear. Behind, two other women appeared; identical except for the colour of their eyes. One had eyes as blue as displaced drops of the Aegean. The other's were grey. Both looked more tenderly at him but advanced with deliberation. They too wore glinting belts of stones; green prasiolite, smoky quartz, the flush of kunzite. Aphrodite's girdle, with which she kindled lust, he thought, as the stones exploded with light.

Elias felt them \- ice cold - as the women knelt and pressed against him. He gasped, then felt their breasts moving in a tentative caress. Again the cold stones, followed by the compensating flesh. He was submerged and swam through the surging layers of quartz.

Then the heat and odour of the women's flesh; sour and sweet with perpetual anticipation. Elias could not be sated. The colours swirled, his senses reeled. He could not distinguish one woman from another. They seduced, complied, yet left him needing more. And, finally, they faded.

Saul found Elias slumped on the floor. He roused him. Elias did not know who he was.

"What happened?" Saul asked. Elias could not recall. Feebly, he rubbed a hand across his face. He was pale and when he tried to rise, fell back.

"You're ill. Come to the bedroom and lie down," said Saul, assuming lack of nourishment was taking its toll. Saul needed none and still felt strong.

Elias was difficult to help downstairs. His bulk and bewilderment hampered every step. He was silent, but had partial recall of some solace and provocation of which in the past he had been master. Now, as in childhood, he was the victim.

He lay in the bedroom, from where the ghosts of his earthly women had gone at last. It was as hollow as a tomb. He breathed with difficulty and incomprehension distorted his flabby face.

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Movements Of The Moon

Saul lies near Elias on a crushed velvet couch. As Elias drifts into disruptive dream, Saul drops through time; brushed by fleeting follies and desires, to a void before the conscious divisions of heaven and hell. He is drawn into infinity.

The woman is vast, her flesh emerging from the blackness, her feet flailing above water. Saul reaches in his sleep to steady her but she expands, beyond his grasp. Raising her arms, she thrusts the sky, streaked now with light, high above her head and straining her great feet, pushes the sea downwards. The foam flies across her body, which slowly begins to undulate and turn, with increasing speed, until she is frenziedly dancing on the water.

She spins southwards, pursued by the north wind. She whirls and clasps it in her hands; rubs it hard and in the air above the tossing tide, a serpent grows; sleek, black, writhing with lust.

The woman, frozen by the wind, dances faster, a flashing cohesion of sea-soaked flesh and flying hair. The serpent coils closer, enveloping the woman, who yields and is lost within the salt scales.

Saul turns in his sleep and sees the sated woman emerge, her limbs fade and yield feathers as she turns into a dove. On the waves a silver egg appears, wrapped in foam and tossed towards the serpent. Possessively he coils round it seven times.

Saul turns again. There is a silent explosion of light. He covers his eyes with his hands. When he takes them away, he sees the moon, the sun, an Earth laced with water, fire and rustling green growth.

Saul recognises Eurynome, the goddess of the Pelasgians, wandering to Greece from Palestine more than three thousand years ago. Is Earth being reborn or, has he, as he suspects, been carried back in time?

As she spins her face changes. Around her roses grow. Their petals fly in a rich red cloud, filling the black bowl of chaos like an omen of ensuing distress. Her body bleeds. She shimmers like a fireball.

In his deep sleep Elias rose and moved to the terrace. The Empusae reappeared, laughing as they walked to the chequer board. They twirled the ends of their girdles in defiance at the earthen men.

"Eleni, Loanga!" Elias was convinced these fickle females were his women transformed. They skipped now like growing girls. They circled the silent men, reaching to tease and test their response. The men shifted uneasily on powerful feet. The two Elias had seen changing sex had regained masculinity.

"No! They're mine!" Elias cried to the men as the women closed in. His voice was enfeebled and snatched away on the wind. One woman took off her girdle and wound it playfully around a man's shoulders. He shivered with the cold and rising lust and as the woman danced away, he followed. Other men reached for the women who remained. They sidled and spun to confuse and entice. They wove sinuously between the men until, reaching the end of the chequer board, they began to run, their hair flying and their voices borne and discarded by the wind.

"No!" Elias stumbled from the terrace but, weak and overweight, could not gain on the men. The women mocked them as they danced ahead. They reached the dark hillside and suddenly vanished, as though absorbed by rock. The men, who had now found vestigial voices, called after them. As they reached the mountain, they too disappeared.

Breathless, Elias passed from day to an inner core of night. He heard the running men and women, the yelps of the Empusae as they danced ahead and the grunts of the earth men in pursuit.

Elias could see nothing. But the inner rock smelt of the sea. Extending his hands, he felt incrustation and envisaged sea gods long extinct; Proteus, surrounded by scaly goddesses like grey seals. He saw six headed Skylla, lustful Triton and the prodigious Poseidon. Elias might be touching his salt soaked skin. And he heard the sea as though he held a shell to his ear.

The laughter ceased. Elias paused. The men still pursued, panting and incensed. Elias heard the high pitched yelp of a young dog. Seconds later he saw a glint of light. The rock opened and a translucent lake shot with blue, lilac and green danced in the mist. On the shore, scattered with peridot and spectrolite, stood three white dogs of indeterminate breed; identical except for the colour of their eyes. They watched the earth men's ragged arrival and simultaneously, began to whine. The men, confused, backed away. Now the dogs' eyes turned red. They frothed at the mouth. Their white coats darkened.

Elias shouted and picking up a large piece of spectrolite, threw it at the dogs. They barked, deep throated now and snarling, but backed into the water. It billowed from below, drawing them down. Silence. The men stared, cheated and at a loss. Elias approached them.

"Come." Although the Empusae had changed identity, Elias believed that, within them, his women still existed. And that they would return. He must draw off the earth men.

A grey mist thickened on the water and from its curling, came a boat with a long, pointed prow and canopy reminiscent of those used by the early people of Thera. It glided silently towards them. It was empty.

Elias boarded. The boat's floor was composed of mist. The men followed. The boat sighed with a woman's voice and slowly slipped away.

The mist ebbed and flowed, revealing intermittent water. But the lake's shore was not visible. Elias observed the earth men's innocence. Their faces were unflawed, reactions passing according to events. They were already responding to memory and sensation.

Elias felt uneasy. Women he feared, yet, on his terms, had mastered. But, apart from cultivated Nikos and his kind, he was unsettled by men's presence. Saul was an exception.

He heard hammering. The mist cleared and the boat glided with grace against an island of pale green growth and motionless white lilies. They rustled. Femininity in the form of flowers. Around some stems fine gold chains were wound and within the trumpets glimmered minute stones. Incongruously the hammering persisted. The boat brushed the bank and stopped. Elias and the earth men stepped into the pallid green.

The lilies lightly touched their skin as they passed. Connotations of the feminine caress. The men were physically stirred. Elias felt deprived.

They walked towards the hammering. There was a gleam of gold in the grass and the elegant head and shoulders of a woman appeared. Pure gold; the hair molten as though just cast. Around her neck she wore alternating stones of tanzanite and pearl. Her heavy-lidded eyes and skin shone. More of her body emerged; smooth gold, unclothed, each limb faultlessly fashioned and co-ordinated with grace.

The men were stunned. The tall woman paused among the lilies. They could not be sure she saw from her opaque eyes. But certainly she sensed them. She turned, crushing pale growth beneath her golden feet. She began to walk through the lilies. The men followed. She was moving towards the hammering.

The lilies and long pale leaves thinned. A curious foundry appeared, floating above the misty ground. Beside it a lame old man hobbled. But, briefly revealed through the billowing smoke, his shoulders and arms were powerful. From the fire he slowly drew another woman of gold; shaping her limbs one by one, lingering over her curves, easing her gently from the flames.

He stood her on her feet. She leaned perilously, then found her equilibrium. He stood back; misshapen man witnessing perfection.

Elias stepped forward. The man spun round and stared at him, speechless.

"Elias Vandoris." Elias offered his hand. The earth men waited, nonplussed.

"Hephaistos." The old man extended a hand, blackened by the smith's craft. Elias smiled sardonically. The man had apparently named himself after a god. But the golden women? The god had made them to help him in his forge. How had this mere man made women who walked, from gold? However it had happened, the women would be a distraction for the earth men. They would cease their pursuit of the Empusae.

The men grouped around Hephaistos as he skilfully forged the women. More grew from fire. They were identical; malleable as the gold with which he worked. They stood beside the men, facing the flames, unflinching.

The earth men eyed them surreptitiously. Like solid shafts of sunlight, the women began to move across the misty ground. Hephaistos was absorbed in those emerging, but Elias saw the other women reach the lilies, followed by the earth men. He said nothing. The women's hair streamed among the lilies, then disappeared.

When Hephaistos had completed the twelfth woman, he cast slender gold chains for their jewels and when he finally looked up and peered through the smoke, only Elias remained.

He turned in agitation, dropping the chains into the fire. He hobbled to the edge of the compound but saw only the lilies trembling from the passing of the women and earth men.

Elias smiled. Hephaistos said, "Those men. They're familiar. Has Prometheus been busy again?"

"In the twenty first century?" Elias asked. Hephaistos looked confused. "You have come from the future?"

"No. You must be an illusion from the past," said Elias.

Indignantly Hephaistos tried to straighten his crookedness but sagged again in despair. Elias approached him and touched him sympathetically on the shoulder.

"Can't you make more?" he said, referring to the golden women. "It should not be so hard for you who made the mighty Talos," he added, recalling the night when he spoke to Ritsa of ancient Crete.

Hephaistos sank onto the misty ground. "It's such an effort and I'm old. They were to have helped me in the forge."

And in what other capacity, Elias wondered, thinking of his lost women. He and Hephaistos were unsightly. Both craved beauty they could command.

"Who do you work for?" Elias asked.

"Those on Olympus of course. I make thrones mostly," replied Hephaistos. Elias laughed. The old man was delightfully deluded. Yet Elias was haunted by the irrational idea that time had folded back on itself. Why not? If one could look back in time through an astronomical telescope, might not the catastrophe that had transformed Earth, have disrupted time? Was that why his women lived now in the Empusae?

Hephaistos began casting afresh. Elias tried to help. But the golden limbs would not form. The metal fell apart. Smoke mingled with the mist. The men despaired.

As the fire subsided, the woman strung with roses stepped from among the lilies.

"Pandora!" Hephaistos growled, hoarse with smoke. The woman advanced, the roses fading. The petals fell. The woman bled. But the petals grew again.

Elias stared. "Pandora?"

"I made her. I didn't think to see her again," said Hephaistos. Elias knew that when Pandora had opened the burnished casket, all the ills that had since beset man, had been released. Only hope had remained in the bottom as she rapidly replaced the lid. Which was more than could be said for the biblical Eve.

Hope lay in the replenishing rose. With its death and Pandora's scourge, the world's ills were repeated regardless of the past; lessons unlearned, atrocities re-committed. Yet from each distillation of despair, hope sprang. The rose flowered again.

Pandora suffered but did not die. She did not overbear, like Elias's mother. She did not succumb to abuse for small favours, like his women. She did not prudishly withhold like Ritsa. She lived, absorbed and was vulnerable. She fell foul of perfection and tried again.

"You must not touch her," said Hephaistos.

"Why, because she's yours?" asked Elias.

"No. Because she is equilibrium. She will not change. So long as she is alive, man will survive."

Elias considered the ills perpetrated by his own former life. He and everyone he knew, foundered; ducking and diving but usually surviving to repeat the process.

Pandora personified the life he knew. But also the life that had presumably led to disaster and most of humanity's demise.

"Man has lost, you know," he said to Hephaistos, who was standing in awe of his creation.

"Have faith," said Hephaistos. "Remember you have retrieved time. You may try again." Pandora vanished.

The men sank into the mist and talked. Elias was not surprised when Hephaistos began reminiscing. Like Elias, he was well versed in the myths. Yet he did not seem entirely human. As he spoke, his skin lit as though from within. A trick of the light, thought Elias. But, simultaneously, his voice seemed to come from several directions.

"I was premature," he began, "My mother had conceived me during the three hundred years when her relationship with my father was supposed to have been secret."

"Your parents being Hera and Zeus," interjected Elias ruefully.

"Of course. Anyway, mother, seeing how weak I was, threw me off Mount Olympus. Luckily I fell into the sea where Thetis and Eurynome looked after me for nine years. That was where I had my first forge and learned my trade.

"Smiths are sorcerers. Everything we make is magical. But mother met Thetis wearing the beautiful brooch I had made for her and forced her to tell where I was. Mother took me back home. She was a dominant woman and demanded a lot in return for her affection."

Briefly, Elias saw his mother in their apartment in Heraklion.

"Mother became impossible," Hephaistos continued, "In the end I made her a wonderful throne and when she sat on it, I bound her with invisible chains and threw the throne up into the air. My relatives begged me to bring it down. But I replied "I have no mother." And left. My brother Ares couldn't get near the flames of my forge to force me home. Then a most humiliating thing happened. Dionysos got me drunk, put me on a mule and took me home. So I had to bring mother down. Mind you, I demanded that I married Aphrodite in return."

"I understand your feelings towards your mother. I had problems with mine," said Elias. "But I thought your father strung up Hera from heaven when she persecuted Herakles. And that you criticised him and this time HE threw you off Mount Olympus. Didn't you land on Lemnos where the Sintians looked after you?"

"You shouldn't believe all you hear," retorted Hephaistos, "Men will meddle in the gods' affairs and distort our lives."

"Very well. But Aphrodite let you down didn't she?" said Elias.

"Oh yes. The bitch. I found her in bed with Ares. But it was a marvellous net I made to cast over them. So fine it was invisible. Probably my best work. She didn't live that humiliation down in a hurry."

"How do you reconcile being a god with life on Earth?" asked Elias, going along with the old man's delusion for the sake of discussion.

"This is a problem," admitted Hephaistos, "So much is expected from us immortals. But we have the appetites of men. Of course, we have skills of enchantment but we seldom really know who we are."

"What is identity?" asked Elias, unusually philosophical. "Do we need it? Isn't it more useful to assume several according to circumstances?"

"Useful, yes. But you may meet a situation where only who you really are will do, when you cannot take cover in subterfuge. Then what?"

Elias could not envisage such a situation. He had lived on his wits, playing the chameleon. "And how do you regard women now, after the problems with your mother?"

Hephaistos sighed. "They are desirable and infuriating," he confessed. "None has ever wanted me. I've had to bargain or create them myself. I thought at last, with these golden women, I had some I could control. Then you come along with the resurrection of original man \- and my women have gone!"

"I'm sorry. This is a dream," said Elias.

"Oh no, it's real enough. Feel those flames if you don't believe me." Hephaistos indicated the forge. Briefly Elias brushed his hand through the fire. It burned.

"Now tell me about your women," Hephaistos urged, lust lighting his eyes.

Elias, shaken by the fire's existence, complied, speaking with nostalgia and regret. "I know they're still alive," he concluded, "They're punishing me for their humiliation. They are in the Empusae."

Hephaistos looked up quickly. "What do you know of them?" he queried. "You must have nothing to do with them."

Elias related the seductions and his debilitation. "You'll die if you give in to them," warned Hephaistos, "Be wary of women. And beasts. They might be women at their most vengeful and deceptive."

"And what of Pandora? Can no one have her?"

"No one."

Elias sighed. The mist thickened. Hephaistos blurred. Elias succumbed to exhaustion.

He woke to the touch of cold fingers. Opening his eyes he saw the mist had cleared and he was on a hill overlooking the lilies and green growth. Black poplars rose to a great height around him. Their rustling was like the low, lascivious voices of women.

Elias sat up. The fingers reached again from behind, covering his eyes. When they were taken away a young woman appeared before him. One of the Empusae? Apprehensively he recoiled. But she gazed at him entreatingly. There was no hint of his women in her. She had hair like fire, bound high with cistus and blue tourmaline. Her half smile was guileless. Her body was that of a girl about to become a woman. Elias relished her innocence.

As she knelt, he grasped her waist and drew her to him. He kissed between her breasts. Suddenly she was standing under a black poplar laughing. Incensed, Elias rose and stumbled towards her. But she appeared to melt into the black bark, her skin acquiring a grainy sheen; lightening and darkening in spellbound play.

The poplars disturbed Elias. Within their gloom were intimations of a darker, nameless menace. The girl reappeared. This time Elias did not try to touch her. Debilitation overcame him again. Yet he was compelled to follow the girl.

She skipped among the trees where springy blue growth clung to the ground and around the black base of the trunks. A game? Elias brightened. The girl dodged among the trees, pausing to look back mockingly at the man's clumsy pursuit.

"You minx!" he muttered, delighted, then distressed. Twice the girl appeared close enough to touch his face with cold fingers. But when he tried to clutch her, she was again out of reach.

Eventually the poplars thinned. Sky appeared, washed by a pale sun. White doves settled on the branches of the outer trees. They gazed at Elias with the eyes of his dead women.

He stopped, gazed back and shuddered as their eyes struck deep within his bewildered psyche. The doves cooed and closed their eyes. Elias saw the girl crouching by winding water that had materialised at the bottom of a gentle slope. As the soft sun struck it, the colours moved through the spectrum and small birds, with the wings of butterflies flew along it, intermittently diving for food.

Elias sat on the blue ground, drained yet lulled now with a sense of well being. The girl stepped into the water. She lowered herself slowly, watching Elias with laughing eyes. The water lapped her shoulders. Her red hair fell, scattering petals and stones and floated on the surface like fire.

Now Elias knew she had a purpose. Enticingly, he was being led. The girl rose and lowered herself again. She spread her arms on the water. The birds hovered over her head, their translucent wings brushing her hair.

At length she rose from the water, the droplets falling from her skin like precious stones. Elias was enraptured. She was original woman; flawless, unattainable, eternal.

But when she stepped onto the bank she was again a girl, growing into maturity. Languidly Elias rose and followed her. She skipped beside the water, her red hair streaming in the sun.

"What's your name?" Elias panted, exerting himself to keep pace. "Eleni," she called. Elias halted. "No, you can't be. Her hair was black. She didn't even look like you."

He tried to resist going forward. He heard the warning of Hephaistos. Empusae. She is one of them, he thought. But he was compelled to follow her by the water.

They entered a grove of tall flowering plants with petalled heads of gold and black on stems the shade of wet sand. They murmured. Were they mocking him? They smelled faintly of feminine flesh and as Elias brushed against their stems, he felt a shiver of desire. He would have touched one but feared losing sight of the girl. She wove like fire among the flowers.

The day faded. The flowers closed. The girl's bright hair silvered. She turned. Her face was pale. They had reached a long, growthless slope with a blue-grey sheen. Elias could not see the bottom. Mist swirled upwards in curling white wisps.

The girl beckoned, tossed her silver hair. With short leaps she began to descend the slope. Cautiously Elias followed.

As they went down, the mist dispersed. The darkening land spread infinitely around them. Then rocks, layered in agate and quartz, rose from the mist and within them grew a vast grove of white poplars.

They whispered conspiratorially. The austere moon appeared, slanting white light through their branches, to fall in pensive pools on the ground.

Elias thought swift shadows passed through the trees. He believed he was being watched. But each time he focused on a movement, he saw only the slender trunks of poplars.

"Eleni!" he called the girl by the name she had used. He wanted to see her eyes. Were they Eleni's? She paused. He approached and looked deep into them. He saw the seas of the moon.

"Who are you?" he asked.

"Selene."

"Why did you say you were Eleni?"

"I thought to please you. You miss her don't you?"

"Yes of course. But where are you from?"

Selene smiled. She said nothing, but took his hand. Exhausted, he let her lead him to a fire of glowing charcoal, heaped high with ash. White poplars grew in a circle round the fire before which Selene knelt and uttered an inaudible incantation. She rose and gestured to Elias to approach.

"Look into the omphalos," she said.

Elias sank and let his eyes rest on the inner fire. Vaguely he was again aware of other eyes watching from among the trees. But he was drawn deeper into the glowing core of the omphalos. He was no longer an inhabitant of Earth. He walked on rock, eerily lit and pocked with craters. Through the dust he saw Selene come and go. Elias, weightless, pursued her. He almost felt his former self.

Was he on the Moon? Dark in itself, it reflected Earth's light; a fossil moving away from Earth. Intermittently, a glow rose from the surface. Gas, dust, a volcano?

Suddenly Selene appeared. She was mounted on a horse; small, supple, its white coat struck by metallic light. Selene seemed an inextricable part of the beast as it dipped delicate hooves into the dust. Her hair lifted fan-like around her head, diminishing her face. Her limbs flexed with those of the horse. Elias reached for her, saw her laugh and stumbled after the side-stepping beast. They reached a hollow where the rising mists thinned.

The horse moved away. Elias followed. The dust lifted; horse and rider intermittently emerging from it like wraiths. They vanished into hollows, then reappeared, the horse's hooves hovering above the moon dust. Effortlessly Elias followed.

A cave of incongruous strata; close-banded and metallic, appeared. Selene dismounted. Suddenly the horse opened great white wings and, feeling the air with its forelegs, rose towards the stars.

Elias looked back to the cave. Selene smiled and beckoned. Elias stepped inside. It was pulsating, pitch black. Then he saw the glow of strange stones.

Selene began a seductive yet girlish dance, her limbs carving gentle curves, barely visible in the gloom. Elias reached both arms and felt the moon-cold flesh. It shrank as he sunk his eager hands deep into the young woman's waist. The skin seemed to dissolve and his fingers foundered in air. He lay flat. Selene lowered onto him. Before he could make a move, he was absorbed and drained.

Sleep is a deep dark blanket into which he haplessly sinks. But in the darkness, he is aware of an awakening; the young woman moving tirelessly. He knows he is within her, yet he cannot control his actions. He swirls through moon dust and the weightless stones of the cave. He lusts without satiation.

He sees the faces of fifty women, advancing and receding. Each bears traces of himself and Selene.

When Elias woke he was back by the omphalos. It glowed more intensely, the white ash heaped high, the charcoal red hot. With difficulty he looked away. White poplars reached along a glimmering ridge to another mound, ghostly in the moonlight.

Elias approached. As he drew near he saw it comprised the purest sea shells. Pearl pink, unsullied white, palest blue and tinged with green, they seemed magically suspended in a perfect cone.

Tentatively, Elias reached to touch one. It might have been the unviolated flesh of a woman. The shells collapsed; a rain of brief beauty, scattering beneath the trees.

Horrified, Elias stepped back. Already the shells' brilliance had faded. The ground they had covered was slightly raised. Elias ran his hand over it. He thought he felt a slight pulse. He recoiled, then began to lightly scrape away the earth. He leapt up. Exposed was the half rotten face of a man. Bone shone starkly through decaying flesh. Elias, numbed, stepped back. Soft hands grasped his shoulders. He spun round to confront a woman; shining and serene, maturely confident yet youthfully unblemished.

She seemed clothed in moonlight.

"Selene?" She did not reply. She was older. Her hair had darkened. As the moonlight moved across her body, it emphasised the grace and athleticism of her legs and the benign curve of her waist. Around it lay a girdle. Elias could not discern whether it comprised minerals, light or some other element to stun the senses.

His hands reached once more. Fat fingers touched the girdle which had the feel of flesh. Elias wished to consume this essence of woman; to savour her variety and die, sated. He recalled the stones the Empusae wore and was drawn once more into shooting depths of colour.

He could not be sure if he entered the woman. His sensations were confused. But he was willingly submerged. He was relieved at not being obliged to dominate. Regaining consciousness, he saw the woman watching him. She merged with the white bark of a poplar, her girdle glinting as dawn lightened the eastern sky.

Elias knew she was Aphrodite. He was awed, subdued by her ill concealed scorn, her faultless limbs, her black hair lifting like a night cloud.

"I thought - I mean Selene must have thought - you were an ill-preserved Endymion," she said. "Another fifty daughters to groom for immortality - although since you are mortal they may not qualify."

Elias was baffled. Then he recalled the moon and the woman in the cave. He thought it unlikely she had taken him for Endymion, the elegant young man of legend, who gave Selene fifty daughters and, instead of death, was granted everlasting sleep by Zeus. Yet he knew he had caressed the woman's moon-steeped skin.

Aspects of Selene were apparent in Aphrodite. Elias recalled the women's faces he had seen while asleep. As, when a child, the women were now in charge. He felt the need to assert himself. But his will was depleted.

"Who?" Elias pointed to the shattered mound. Aphrodite averted her face. Elias did not repeat his query. An almost tangible silence enveloped them. Elias looked up. The sun had risen but the moon moved steadily across the morning sky. It reached and overlapped the sun. The temperature dropped. Elias turned to Aphrodite. She was smiling. She placed her hands gently on his cold shoulders. The earth darkened.

"She's jealous," she said.

"Who?"

"Selene."

The sun vanished. A low wind wandered as though lost without light.

"An eclipse," said Aphrodite.

Vaguely Elias remembered seeing one as a child. Viewing the phenomenon through a darkened piece of glass. But now the earth seemed hollow, devoid of life. The darkness had a cold impenetrability. It clung; its intensity accentuated by the silence. Only the glow of the omphalos was visible.

Then the sun's outer atmosphere spread ghostly fingers from behind the moon, reaching eerily for the Earth. Poplars reappeared and the sun emerged as the moon slid away.

Elias was dazzled. Aphrodite shimmered; inscrutable and unsullied. She began to walk towards the omphalos. Elias followed. Aphrodite knelt and looked deep into the fire.

Four women appeared. They were naked, save for wreaths of laurel in their hair and strung carelessly from their shoulders and waists. Their eyes were unnaturally bright and did not focus normally. They looked inward.

Elias recoiled. The euphoric women emanated menace. They stood untidily around the omphalos, then, like Aphrodite, knelt and tried to focus wide eyes on its core.

Elias felt the female pressure and responded with a need to retaliate, yet was devoid of will. He watched instead the lazy action of limbs, the undulations of the laurel leaves.

Aphrodite rose, went to a white poplar and from the ground at its roots, picked a large psilocybe mushroom. She brought it to Elias, lightly plucked off the top and bade him eat. Carefully, he bit and chewed. He entered another dimension.

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The Matriarchy

As he looked at Aphrodite, her flesh expanded. Her girdle gained presence; its stones shooting shafts of light. Heavily, Elias sat, mind and body disconnected. He was by a surging sea. From it the black hair of Aphrodite suddenly appeared, splayed and strung with shells on the water. Gradually her white body emerged; foam-flecked, her feet lifted above the waves by a scallop shell which carried her to shore. Two white doves appeared.

Elias heard a cough. He looked round to see Hephaistos, bent and blackened in the summer sun.

"Change destiny!" he said simply, indicating Aphrodite. "She will have ten children and she will break my heart. Time is ours now Elias. Prevent her."

Elias was incredulous. "How can I alter fate?"

"You may be as much a misfit as me but you have a way with women. I only have trinkets to offer them," said Hephaistos.

Aphrodite was walking from the sea, away from them into the sun. "Follow her," said Hephaistos, hoarsely.

The influence of the Great Goddess prevailed. It was not suspected that men impregnated women. They gave birth after bathing in the river or exposing themselves to the north wind. Woman was omnipotent. Man was sacrificed to fertilise the earth. He was helpless before the matriarch.

But small doubts began to nag at men's minds. Should they believe every word the women uttered? Might they not be manipulating men for their own ends - the priestesses sustaining rites to prolong power? It was even rumoured the Great Goddess did not exist. The suspicion was instantly dismissed and, in secret places, doubters asked her forgiveness. Defiance might mean crop failure, famine. If she did not exist, how did the world? What sustained life? How was the Earth fructified if not by human blood?

Aphrodite walked into the sun. Elias was suddenly motivated and floundered behind through the sand. "Stop her going to Hermes," croaked Hephaistos. He recalled the young god at the bed as Aphrodite and Ares lay immobile beneath the net. Hermes had openly declared his desire for Aphrodite. Hephaistos knew the outcome of their liaison would be Hermaphroditus; an androgynous being, and the contention between man and woman would begin.

The Earth's imbalance would follow. A patriarchy would be established. Unattainable ideals, delusions and aggression would replace a respect for the earth. Alienating technology would develop. There would be weapons of destruction and eventually man would be annihilated.

Saul is suspended in time; trapped at the birth of creation. He senses Elias, blundering in some future span, immersed in an epic mission Saul senses is related to the re-played destiny of man. Beyond that he can grasp nothing.

He walks now on a cloud-like substance stretching into infinity. He senses imminent danger, the birth pangs of chaotic creation; a state of boundless uncertainty.

From drifting vapour, a woman slowly materialises. She is strung with a girdle of seduction and light. Aphrodite.

Saul steps back, yet the goddess gains on him. Smiling. As he raises an arm to ward her off, she begins to dissolve - limb by limb. Woman into vapour. Vapour forming flesh.

How much is illusion? How much real? The philosophy he reveres is as speculative as mythology. Where is Elias? Can they really have regained the past?

Saul involuntarily descends. The dream-spinning vapour thins. A soft land of silver and green appears; the olive groves of ancient Greece, rife with unworldly whispers.

Elias appears - immobile before a woman merging with the bark of a poplar. Aphrodite has found him.

Saul longs to intercept them, to warn Elias of illusion, the betrayal of the senses, ironically enhanced by imagination. The mind and the material world are one, yet from the mind grows strife and schisms fed by fear, distorting and prompting destruction. Empedocles perceived this double world: "For they are all in union with their own parts - Sun and Earth and Heaven and Sea - which have been separated from them and grown in mortal things. In the same way, those that are more ready to blend are made similar by Aphrodite and love one another. But most hostile are the things which differ most from one another in birth and blending and moulded shape, quite unaccustomed to come together and deeply dismal at their strife-birth because they were born in anger."

Saul contemplates unity and strife; sexual and psychological. And the technology that made mass destruction possible. He considers the succeeding dominance of the feminine and masculine psyche; the failure to merge fundamental instincts. Can Aphrodite, as man's symbol of love, unite the disparate? Is this second coming of the savage past, a chance for reassessment?

Can man, woman, the sensual and the spiritual unite? Elias exists through the flesh. Saul's life lies in the mind. There should be a balance; an interlinking of matter and analysis; the tempering of phallic drive by female intuition.

Empedocles believed opposites periodically unite in a homogenous sphere. He held that this sphere dissolves and the world is established in stages. History is reversed. Could not opposites permanently unite and the sphere be sustained?

Saul sees the unending cosmic cycle; the flying apart and the growing together. Yet how had the past regenerated? And may man's destiny be altered?

Through rising waves of discord, he steps into another element of change and integration. He can feel the gods, as Empedocles had, pass through one another and emerge transformed.

Hephaistos, on his crooked legs, watched Elias stumble after Aphrodite. He probably wants her too and who can blame him? Hephaistos thought.

Hermes was waiting by winding water steeped in lilies.

"No!" Elias tried to run but could not reach Aphrodite before she walked into the water up to her glittering girdle, held out her arms, dripping with sun-shot water pearls and drew Hermes gently into the lilies. Elias could no longer see them when he reached the water.

Desperately, the words of Hephaistos harsh in his ears, he looked among the lilies and out to the grove of white poplars beyond. No one was visible. Only the water murmured through the flowers and, with sudden nostalgia, he recalled the floating islands in his pool at home.

He found a place where the water narrowed and it was shallow enough to cross. He swished through the lilies, up the bank and through the silent poplars. Periodically he paused and listened. He heard a distant peal of laughter but could not detect its direction. He imagined a drift of dark hair through the dancing leaves. But the illusion vanished with the lilting laugh.

The poplars thinned. Ridges of pale dunes waving with wild daffodils unfolded to the clear horizon. Elias saw the flash of Aphrodite's girdle. She was moving as though in low level flight through the sand. There was no sign of Hermes. Aphrodite gazed towards a building of neo-Classical elegance.

Elias halted in fearful disbelief. It was his home, yet it was subtly changed. The symmetrical inset of its windows had been replaced by some irregularity he could not quite define. And it stood too far from the sea.

On approaching, he saw it was built of marble laced with fine black veins. Red roses grew thickly outside, their petals drifting into a pool of limpid water glinting in the dunes.

A woman, loosely robed in white, appeared. "You know, Cinyras, Smyrna's more beautiful than Aphrodite herself," she said, addressing the house.

"You should not say that!" A man's voice from inside. Aphrodite had reached the pool. She stood invisibly within the split bark of an olive.

A striking young woman stepped from the house. Her fair hair was coiled with flowers. Her pale blue robe reflected the sky. She smiled and sat by the white-clad woman. Her mother? The man emerged. Elias saw the family likeness. Undoubtedly the young woman's father.

Briefly, a strong light emanated from Aphrodite. Simultaneously, the family blinked. Aphrodite disappeared, gathered into the summer air.

Smyrna looked long at her father, as though seeing him for the first time. When he rose to return to the house, she followed with a measured, mechanical step. They entered the building. The wife wandered from the pool over the dunes to look at the distant sea.

Elias moved, unseen, to the pool and slipped into the house. The interior was dark. Cretan carpets were on the floors and walls and Elias felt faint nostalgia. Cinyras was walking briskly up the central stairway. Smyrna was close behind.

"What is it?" He turned.

"Father. Wait. I want to talk to you."

"Of course, my dear. Come."

They passed into an elaborate room that Elias could see from the bottom of the stairs and he withdrew into shadow. Carefully, he climbed the stairs. He stood close to the wall, peering round into the room which again, uncannily echoed one of his own, with deep couches and Eastern miniatures on the walls.

He hastily withdrew as Smyrna turned to the door as though sensing his presence. But he slowly edged round again to take another look.

"Father." The young woman extended her arms, clasping her hands behind her father's neck. He registered alarm. She drew him down onto the couch and kissed his lips. He recoiled, thrusting her from him.

"Father!" she persisted, her voice a sensual purr of rebuke. This time Cinyras did not resist when she clasped him, easing him on top of her as she stretched out. He tore open her blue robe.

Elias withdrew, shocked and confused. He heard Smyrna's mother entering the house and edged into the room next to where father and daughter lay, the door still open. Smyrna's mother moved away downstairs. Intermittently Elias looked out of the room in an attempt to see what was happening. After almost an hour Smyrna came out of the room, her torn robe draped lightly and walked to the end of the passage and into what, Elias assumed, were her own quarters. Some time later Elias heard Cinyras leave the room. Elias waited until the silence was unbroken, then crept down the stairs and out of the house.

Time lapsed. Elias had no record of its passing. But he suspected that weeks rather than hours had been gathered by the gods.

He was in the garden concealed by the pool. He heard a scream and saw Smyrna running from the house, her father behind her, brandishing a sword.

"You slut!" he shouted, "I'll kill you."

Elias could see that Smyrna was pregnant. Serves her right, he thought. The resentment of women that had motivated his former life, returned. He watched the distraught young woman without compassion.

She ran from the garden, dressed now in a lilac robe that billowed in her wake. Cinyras gained on her, the sword flashing in the sun. Then Elias saw Aphrodite, standing once more within the olive. As Smyrna ran up the dunes, Aphrodite emitted another brief flash of light.

Smyrna stopped. Her head became a cluster of fluttering leaves, her arms stiffened into boughs, her legs turned into reaching roots. A myrrh tree.

Cinyras lunged and split her with his sword. Out fell a beautiful boy child. Cinyras froze. Aphrodite approached and fondled the boy. She lifted and carried him over the dunes. On the sunspilt crest of one lay a gilded chest.

Elias left the pool and cautiously drew near. Aphrodite lay the child in the chest and the sand fell away, the chest slowly slipping into a chasm.

"Take care of him Persephone!" called Aphrodite. She vanished.

Elias saw Hephaistos hobbling across the dunes.

"You failed!" he called. Elias thought of leaving in the opposite direction. But he stayed where he was as Cinyras, dazed, but regaining mobility, wandered back to the house. The old smith reached Elias.

"What could I have done?" asked Elias. Hephaistos shrugged. "I never favoured the sacrifice of so many young men but now Adonis has been born, we shall live through the unrest all over again. Men will start demanding their rights. Their reigns as sacrificial kings will be extended. Eventually they will oust the women from power."

"Was that Adonis in the chest?" asked Elias.

"Yes. He will be brought up in the Underworld. Aphrodite will demand him for part of the year and with the help of her wretched girdle, end up with him all the time. Persephone will tell Ares. He will turn himself into a boar and kill Adonis. Anemones will grow from his blood. What is worse, Aphrodite will have two children by him. The whole thing has probably gone too far to stop now."

Elias was remembering the early matriarchies when young men were sacrificed to fructify the earth. He had not delved deeply into these. Their feminine impact was too reminiscent of his childhood.

Aphrodite, he recalled, was worshipped. Her representative was attended by maniacal priestesses. She selected a sacred king. His reign was brief.

Elias could not believe he had met the goddess. The white woman must be one of her priestesses. Hephaistos still stood dejectedly beside him; the calamitous future in his eyes.

"I'm off to Lemnos," he said suddenly. "They appreciate me there."

"Won't I see you again?" said Elias, who was developing an affection for him.

"Probably. And if you come across my golden women, call my name in the still of the night."

Elias had forgotten them in the fast flow of events. He thought again of Pandora. But she was unattainable.

"Don't have any dealings with Aphrodite," urged Hephaistos, "You may be no Adonis but she will stop at nothing. It's her nature."

Elias felt depleted, yet rose and wandered through the poplars. They thinned and he confronted a strange bleached building set with shells. Women's laughter rang within. Elias passed through blue-flowered scrub, as seven young women ran from the house. They wore loose robes, like a lilting extension of the grass. Flowers were strung across them and trailed in the scrub.

Elias could no longer contain himself. He walked towards the women. On seeing him \- rank and dishevelled - they shrieked and turned to run back into the house.

"Wait!" Elias struggled after them, "I won't hurt you." He followed them into the house. The white structure curved with connotations of the human body. Animal hides lay on the floor and walls. The virgins blushed and waited for Elias to speak again.

When he did not, absorbed and excited by their ingenuousness, one asked, "Are you a guardian?"

Elias looked blank.

"Yes," he said impetuously.

"You'll be watching the foot race then tomorrow."

"Er - which one is that?"

The young women smiled behind their hands.

"To choose the Queen, of course," said another with loose hair the colour of sunshot sand.

"Oh yes." Elias did not want to give them more evidence of being an impostor. It was then he realised the house was built of human bones. He was stunned into silence.

"Where are the guardians just now?" he asked when he had regained composure. One woman, more ethereal, yet also more assured than the others, stepped forward. Where had he seen her before?

"They're in the olive grove, preparing the meat for tomorrow." She too, apparently knew him. But, silently, she withdrew.

Elias looked for the olive grove. It shimmered to the east, a silver-grey sea in the sun. It seemed deserted but, on nearing, he saw shadows in the trees. They were men bearing beasts on their shoulders, skinned for cooking.

As Elias entered the grove, the men paused, dropped the animals and reached for the long knives they wore in their belts.

"I come in peace," Elias assured them. They kept the knives poised, then seeing he was unarmed, relaxed.

"The women sent me to you," said Elias. The men seemed reassured.

"We need all the help we can get," said one, stepping forward. He was tall, bearded; a man of candid confrontation and obvious strength.

"Aeson," he said bluntly, introducing himself.

"Elias Vandoris."

"Have you travelled far?"

Elias nodded, refraining from referring to his movement through time as well as place.

"You have been appointed a guardian?"

"Er - yes. You must tell me what's involved."

"We look after the Queen. We hunt, gather food, repair the defences."

"Against whom?"

"Wild animals and abductors. They have been known."

"Of the Queen?"

"No, her consort. Sometimes his relatives risk death to rescue him. But no one has yet succeeded."

Elias knew now the old claims were true. The matriarch killed the king to fructify the earth.

"Does the Queen have many lovers?"

"Yes, almost nightly. Sometimes we are called."

"And she will be selected tomorrow?"

"Yes, the women run the foot race by the black mountains."

The next day was hot with a heavy haze obscuring the sun. The guardians were up early preparing food. Elias helped, needing instruction since, formerly, his mother or his women had cooked for him.

Having made some contribution, he edged towards the house. He could hear the young women within, preparing for the race. Occasionally a lithe figure passed a window. What became of the losers? wondered Elias. Priestesses? He devised a dozen ways to rouse and sate them. Deprived of domination, he felt diminished. Yet his mind moved through ploys of prolonged pleasure.

He saw the crowd by the black mountains that rose beyond the poplars. He joined these people, who wore loose robes, the colour of earth.

The women arrived. Excited, fearful, milling. The ethereal woman who had approached Elias at the house, was among them. But she stood still and was silent. She saw Elias on the edge of the crowd and watched him steadily. Her dark hair was closely coiled, complementing her natural composure.

As the women lined up, she followed; confident, unhurried. She joined them, bending with grace, and as a priestess gave the order to start, she sprang forward, as though mysteriously propelled.

From the start she was well to the fore. By halfway, her feet barely touching the ground, she was leading. She won, several lengths ahead of the others.

She was carried on the shoulders of the guardians who were waiting at the finishing line. They processed, the other young women following to the house of bones.

A great throne made of more bleached and intricately laced bones, had been placed on the cleared area before the house.

The Queen was lowered onto it. The other women knelt before her. They were priestesses, as Elias had assumed. Again, he felt he knew the Queen. Many of her gestures recalled those of Aphrodite. She looked directly at him and indicated he should approach.

With sudden misgiving and a sense of awe in conflict with his need to dominate, he advanced. The woman reached an elegant arm and gently touched his head. "My commander!" she said. He rose, feeling however, powerless.

He discovered he would command the guardians. He was their senior. Was that why the Queen had chosen him? Aeson came up and congratulated him.

"What are my duties?" asked Elias.

"You must divide and direct our labour," said Aeson. Elias wondered if his duties included nights spent with the Queen.

"We are going to change the system," said Aeson suddenly, as Elias viewed the men in his charge.

"How?" He was interested.

"No one is in favour of killing the Queen. That would surely bring death upon us all. But we want to extend the king's reign. These are young men in the prime of life. It's tragic it should be so short."

"When will the Queen choose her king?" asked Elias.

"Tonight. He will be from another part of the country. But that is all we know. We do not know how she chooses him or what happens."

"How do you intend to extend the king's reign?" asked Elias.

"We may abduct the Queen. We have ways of persuasion but we dare not take them too far. That would endanger us and the Earth."

"Why? She's only a woman." Elias knew, as soon as he said this, he had planted suspicion in the men's minds. Where had he come from, that he should speak of the Queen in this way?

"What happened to the former Queen?" he asked.

"She died of fever."

They were silent as they went about their chores. Elias flinched as they fetched and carried, uncomplaining, as though it was part of a universal plan.

The next day was overcast. Elias, having dithered over decisions that the men appeared to have already made, moved surreptitiously again towards the house. Starkly, it stood in silence. The Queen's throne was empty.

Then Elias heard a cry of gratification. Cautiously, he peered through a window and saw the new Queen; naked, crouching and laughing, while a young man, also naked, stalked her like a hunter. Eventually he sprang, riding her with a shout of exaltation.

Elias moved out of sight as the young man dismounted. The chosen king? He had better enjoy it while he may. Had the Queen been a virgin like her priestesses?

He returned to the olive grove. It was deserted. The guardians were hunting and food gathering. That evening there was more hectic preparation.

"The Queen mates this evening," said Aeson in explanation. Elias was about to point out she already had, but kept quiet.

As darkness enveloped the land and the cloud cleared to reveal the moon, the men went to the clearing before the sepulchral house. The priestesses were already there - kneeling naked and motionless in a wide semi-circle. The men stood in another semi-circle, clad loosely in russet robes. They too were motionless. The stillness hung like a homage.

The Queen appeared, draped in white, the king behind her, wearing black. Elias trembled with voyeuristic anticipation. When the priestesses rose, he saw they were intoxicated - with the mushroom or a distillation of laurel? They began to move as one, swaying slightly and marking a slow rhythm with their feet. Their hair hung loose.

The Queen sat upright on the throne. The king knelt before her, his dark head bowed, the tips of his fingers touching her bare feet. Elias shared his arousal. His self control would intensify the mating.

The women drew closer, their bodies touching as they continued to move in a circle that had now closed. As their excitement grew, they became a single, flowing entity.

Then the Queen guided the king between her knees. Elias looked at the guardians. They remained mute and apparently unmoved.

At a sharp command from the Queen, the priestesses pulled apart and stood, dishevelled and still intoxicated, untidily reforming the circle.

The king disengaged from the Queen and stepped into the clearing. Slowly and with quiet dignity, he discarded his robe and waited, tall as a young tree, soon to be felled. How can he tolerate this? thought Elias.

Musicians had silently appeared from the trees. Their music was strange and carried on a constant beat. The Queen slowly stood and slipped off her robe. Her white skin was enhanced by the moon. With measured grace she lifted her arms to it and threw back her head, so the light swam across her face. The young king, confronting her, aped her action. Both uttered inaudible words of supplication.

The priestesses, wild-eyed behind their trailing hair, followed suit, swaying now to the music. Again they began to circle, their arms raised, their heads thrown back.

The Queen stepped down to her king. They entered the circle and Elias could no longer see them. But as the music quickened and the maenads again moved as one, he knew their marriage had been publicly consummated.

Elias had little to do in his role as commander. His thoughts constantly returned to the Queen. What was her name? Would she take him as a lover? He crept surreptitiously through the poplars, waiting to glimpse her. But she did not appear. Neither did the king.

The guardians were away much of the day, so Elias began to wander from the house towards the black hills. As he neared them the ground lost its blue dusting of scrub and became darkly charred. The mountains swept abruptly to a great height.

Elias climbed. He slipped and found it hard to draw breath. But he reached a rift through which he could see beyond. He was astounded. Twenty first century Heraklion lay before him. Its buildings were undamaged yet apparently deserted. He did not want to descend into its silence. Yet he was compelled to start down the steep slope.

Why should he be moving between present and past? How could he hope to change destiny? He was clearly living some delusion caused by the disaster. Perhaps Heraklion was a mirage of his fevered mind fuelled by mythology and lust.

He continued to approach the town. As in the desert, it drew no nearer. The sun appeared and with it, the figure of a man; youthful, upright, walking purposefully towards Elias. He was wearing the loose garment of an earlier era.

As the men met, the younger offered his hand.

"Adonis," he said simply.

"Elias Vandoris."

Incredulous, Elias said, "You're really Adonis?"

"Yes."

"How do you come to be in the twenty first century?"

Adonis smiled. Elias looked beyond him. Heraklion had vanished.

"Has the Queen chosen?" asked Adonis.

"A king you mean?"

"Yes."

"She has. Why does she remind me of Aphrodite?" asked Elias.

"Aphrodite is everywhere because the people worship her. She has too much power."

Elias thought of his mother; her indulgent domination, a demand for worship.

"There's unrest among the guardians. They want the king's reign extended," said Elias.

"Ah. Now that's why I'm here. We must plan with care. The extension will be a start. But the aim must be to establish a patriarchy."

"But how?"

"Abduction. Reasoning. The men will not suffer Tartarus after death. What we ask is just."

"To share the reign, yes. But to take over?" said Elias, apprehensively.

"One can't command respect if loyalties are divided," said Adonis, "Come."

They began to walk back to the olive grove. Elias saw he was indisputably back in the pre-Hellenic era.

"When will we do it?" he asked.

"In five days' time."

The guardians were impressed when they saw Adonis. Suspicious too. Was he perhaps a spy of Aphrodite's? Elias needed to clarify their beliefs.

"Do you think the Queen is Aphrodite?" he asked Aeson, "No one will tell me her name."

"Aphrodite is everywhere."

That did not answer his query, but Aeson would say no more.

The men convened, expecting Elias and Adonis to take command. But they had already decided to take the Queen to a cave that had been sacred and was now unused.

"What will you do with her?" Elias was curious.

"Reason to begin with. If she will not listen we shall prevent her from performing her rituals."

"And if she doesn't relent?"

"Wait and see," Aeson said.

Slowly the days passed. On the evening of the fifth day the men gathered. Adonis and Aeson led them from the grove. Elias, the slowest, followed.

The grim house glimmered. The Queen was about to emerge for a ceremony dedicated to the moon. The young king followed. The Queen paused when she saw Adonis. Her recognition was quickly suppressed. She is Aphrodite, thought Elias.

Adonis stood firm.

"What's happened? Is it an emergency?" asked the Queen. The guardians were silent. They bowed their heads slightly in habitual submission. Adonis and Aeson stepped forward. The guardians lifted their heads and, not daring to look at the Queen, advanced. She was confused.

"What-?" her utterance was curtailed. Adonis and Aeson seized and manoeuvred her into the mass of guardians. The young king looked on helplessly as the men moved as one, away from the house and skirted the olive grove.

Elias still walked some way behind. He heard the Queen's protestations. They reached open ground. The cave was at the foot of the black mountains.

A young deer darted from the thrusting men and skittered away beneath the moon. The men milled in bewilderment. The Queen had vanished. She IS Aphrodite. Who else could turn herself into a deer? thought Elias.

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### The Sacrifice

He pointed to her as the men looked at him helplessly. Incredulous, yet with no alternative, they gave chase. The deer darted from left to right among the scarred rocks of the foothills.

The cave yawned. The men formed a wide semi-circle, cornering the deer by the cave's entrance. She dashed inside.

The men followed. Elias entered last. They could neither see nor hear the deer in the darkness. They groped haplessly. Loose rocks rattled. Bats flew from the roof with a dusty whirr of wings.

Moonlight streamed into the cave. A woman shimmered in its darkest corner. She was naked except for an exquisite girdle which Elias recognised. The woman smiled. Her flesh seemed unreal, as though made of moonlight. The men were motionless in awe.

The woman made a barely perceptible gesture for the men to approach. Adonis did not stir. He recognised his former lover. Aeson was bolder. He approached her and reached out an arm. He recoiled. It had passed through her flesh, as though she was a ghost.

Still she smiled. Another man stepped forward. This time Aphrodite reached and touched his shoulder. He grasped her and pushed her against the damp wall of the cave. He shouted with pain.

He was seared by the fiercest flame given man by Prometheus. It enveloped his internal organs and leapt like lightening to his brain. His co-ordination was destroyed. His arms fell from Aphrodite. His legs gave and he collapsed into a defensively foetal position.

No one stirred. Then another man, unable to resist Aphrodite's moon-blanched skin, reached with one hand, for the flesh between her breasts and, with the other, for the glinting girdle. He was drawn through a cold flow of ice that immobilised and seeped into every crevice of his being.

Elias moved towards the Queen. Still she smiled and reached both arms to him. He stepped within. They closed. He was elevated, warmed, consumed with desire. He felt her heart beating, her abdomen pulsating. She was the original and only woman. He began to vigorously respond.

The passion turned to excruciating pain. Knives lacerated his flesh. He cried out, crumpled. Blackness.

When he regained consciousness the woman had gone. The men sat in dejection. Adonis stood by the mouth of the cave, watching him. Aeson was beside him, glowering.

"Where is she?" Elias uttered, still wracked with pain.

Adonis shrugged. "She seemed to dissolve."

"I want no more to do with her," said Elias and painfully found his feet.

The men returned. The house seemed deserted and steeped in desolation. But as the men turned away to go to the olive grove, Elias saw Pandora, framed by starlight in the great doorway, her red roses white as milk. She might have reclaimed her virginity.

Elias walked towards her and as he approached she was absorbed, limb by limb, into the night.

The Queen did not reappear. Elias lay, looking at the cloudless sky through the olive branches. The lack of women in his life was taking a toll. He was tense, irritable with Aeson and failing to issue commands.

The king and the priestesses had vanished too. Had Aphrodite transformed herself and them into some unearthly element that would return to haunt the humans who had dared to defy her?

Elias rose and decided once more to approach the black mountains. Would twenty first century Heraklion reappear? He was not far from the olive grove, when a familiar figure appeared to drop from the sky; Hephaistos, limping through the scrub.

He waved both arms when he saw Elias. They embraced and as they walked back to the olives, Elias talked of the attempted abduction.

"Oh no! You should never have done that!" exclaimed the blackened god, "The order of life must be maintained. We shall all end up in Tartarus before our time."

"But she has too much power," said Elias.

"No. She IS the power. That is decreed by the gods. Elsewhere she has her emissaries. We are privileged that she has chosen to appear here in person."

"But where is she?" asked Elias.

"Ah. It's the Spring Equinox. That's why I'm here. She's no doubt preparing for the rituals."

"I saw Pandora," said Elias, "Why does she appear in this way?"

"Probably to remind you of mortality - to keep your head out of the clouds. You can never have a goddess, you know!" said Hephaistos.

"Other men have," said Elias moodily, still reluctant to acknowledge the smith's godly status. Hephaistos ignored him.

How could he watch his wife with another man? wondered Elias who had been possessive of his most casual consort. And, considering how she had treated him, why did he not want Aphrodite ousted from power?

He is a masochist, Elias realised. Not able to gain the love of wife and mother, he still wants to please them, accepting their domination in return for recognition.

But the Queen demands subordination, humiliation and death. Gods have powers we lack, thought Elias. How can we men achieve our ends if the gods decide otherwise?

He looked askance at Hephaistos. The old god's expression was smug. But he said no more.

The Queen returned, dressed in a loose robe that seemed to be woven from the wild wood that, for the first time, Elias saw lay beyond the blue scrub. She wore fresh spring flowers in her hair and was accompanied by white doves.

The young king, also wearing spring leaves, walked a few paces behind. The maenads followed, dressed in scant foliage and thick wreaths of laurel.

Aphrodite sat on the throne of bleached bones. The king knelt silently at her feet. The maenads formed their familiar semi-circle. The guardians had assembled. Adonis stood sullenly to one side. Aeson watched the Queen with a combination of distaste and ill concealed desire.

"The partridge," said Hephaistos enigmatically, as musicians emerged from the house and began to play a shambling rhythm.

The priestesses started to move with a bizarrely hobbling gait. They were clearly intoxicated yet their rolling step was deliberate.

Elias saw the expression change on Hephaistos's face. An eagerness replaced adulation. His crooked legs began to stir. He was suddenly with the maenads, hobbling in a slow circle, his grizzled head nodding, his bent arms flailing.

Eerily he released the call of the partridge. Elias remembered that hens were thought to conceive merely on hearing the male's call. He also knew that the dance might have originated because smiths were highly valued and were hobbled so they would not run away.

Hephaistos tired and limped out of the circle back to Elias. Aphrodite watched him with disdain. The maenads paused as the music ceased. Aphrodite stood up and spread her arms wide. She threw back her head and uttered incomprehensible words.

From the centre of the closed circle formed by the priestesses, a marble pillar protruded. Around it clung a mass of primitive creatures entwined in curious growth with succulent leaves and fleshy flowers. As the pillar rose nine feet from the ground, Elias saw the creatures were copulating. Another trick of the goddess?

The musicians resumed with a slow sensuality that prompted the priestesses to weave with sinuous implication around the pillar. Their pace increased. Again, they interlinked, the foliage falling from their dust-covered flesh, which fused now in exploration.

The Queen gave a high cry of command. The maenads slowed, separated and fell back, dazed, into their circle.

Aphrodite and the young king stepped onto the ritual ground. Aphrodite began to dance in a flow of flowers, whose petals fell and were whirled away as she quickened. The king caught her as she spun and together, they moved as one to the music around the pillar.

Vicariously Elias shared their exchange. Their intercourse was the essence of renewal; a reaffirming of life after Persephone's months in the underworld.

The days lengthened. The sun further bleached the house of bones until it seemed absorbed by white light. Were they the bones of former kings? wondered Elias. Each day seemed to him, a sun-filled bonus. He was not to die but he felt the brevity of the king's life as if it were his own. How could early man have been so misled as to believe that to guarantee the survival of life, a human had to be sacrificed?

He had lived under the threat of nuclear disaster; the ultimate denial of life. Perhaps the sacrifice of the occasional human was preferable to mass murder. But man was perverse. Every resource had been given him to live. Yet, knowing he was already mortal, he went out of his way to die prematurely.

Was a goddess susceptible to persuasion? Elias was curious, exemplifying man's perversity, by disregarding the pain she had inflicted. Did she ever consider an older man?

Elias waited and watched. He saw Aphrodite moving in the house, but seldom the young king. Had she bewitched him? Was she thinking of a sexual adventure without him?

Elias was by now so deprived of sensual solace, his mind wove wild images of indulgence. On reflection, he recoiled from his last encounter with the goddess. But he felt the decision was no longer his.

He ate flycap mushroom and grew bold. He waited until nightfall, then edged close to the house and saw Aphrodite sitting alone in the sparse room. She made strange signs with her hands and her lips moved almost imperceptibly, as though she were communing with some mysterious source. Or was it a magical incantation connected with the renewal of the earth? Elias watched the subtle movements of her flesh. Already he felt its flexibility.

He entered the house. Aphrodite ceased her incantation.

"Commander! How dare you come here?" She rose and her presence pervaded the room.

Elias moved closer, ingratiatingly.

"My Queen!" he ventured, "The men made a grave mistake when they tried to abduct you. It is simply that they feel the gods would surely approve of the king enjoying a longer reign before -"

Aphrodite regarded him imperiously. "They will be punished. Probably dismissed. I have only delayed because of seasonal obligations."

"But do you not think their cause is just?" Elias was now close enough to touch her.

"JUST?" She was outraged. "The gods have decreed how we should live. Who are you to question this?"

Elias replied, "I can only say that when men have more power, there will be technical advance; richness for your fields, inventions to ease everyday living. No need to take human life."

He deliberately avoided reference to warfare and the evolution of deadly weapons. He did not mention the combustion engine and fossil fuels that would destroy an Earth that in this pre-Hellenic era, he barely recognised. Why was he so intent on patriarchy? He knew he wished for personal assertion after his early subordination to women. But had he the right to encourage a regime that would lead to mass destruction? Were there not healthier options as life on Earth re-emerged?

Women could be as aggressive as men. But would they have developed the bomb? Or would they have confined man to tribal warfare - destructive but not annihilating?

In his lifetime, the state conglomerates had dispersed and factional wars resumed. But the bomb lay stockpiled, the material of those that had been dismantled impossible to safely discard. And the unstable had access to nuclear knowledge.

"What is technology?" asked Aphrodite.

"A way of easing life," said Elias. Aphrodite could not imagine what he meant. She had guardians to ease her life.

"But the king will be immortal after death," she said, "He will go to a sacred island. His soul will be gathered to the stars to await re-birth in a future king. That is an honour."

"No. Death is the end," insisted Elias. "There is only darkness. No soul, no spirit survives."

"How dare you mock the gods?" cried Aphrodite."THEY are immortal. Men like you will be condemned to Tartarus."

"Tartarus. Heaven. Hell. All in the mind," Elias said, intoxication rendering him reckless.

"What's Heavenhell?" demanded Aphrodite.

"I can prophesy that after your gods have gone, others will come," said Elias. "Masculine gods and prophets. Buddha, Jesus Christ, Mohammed; the source of creeds ideal for man who needs to mix benevolence with suffering and damnation. He will always need some check on his wilfulness. So give him a soul which can be condemned for eternity if he misbehaves or at least suffer pain on the way to salvation. But, of course, you believe he already has a soul and Tartarus is your hell."

"And in your prophecy, does man ever doubt these gods and the destiny of his soul?"

"For many, gods are replaced by reason and technology." Aphrodite scrutinised him. "Who gave you your gift of prophecy?" she asked.

"Who knows? Does any prophet?" Elias answered cautiously.

"But what becomes of man if the goddess persists?" asked Aphrodite.

"He is depleted by ignorance and death." How apt a summary of his own time, he thought. Yet would a future of orgiastic superstition be preferable?

Did he, in reality, exist? Or was he dead and, in spite of his scepticism, removed, as he had already suspected, to some dimension of dream? He hoped he merely slept and would wake to find his world restored.

He absorbed Aphrodite's fragrance of newly greened fields and early flowers. He reached and felt the immortal flesh; resistant, marble cold. But Aphrodite, taken by surprise and momentarily unable to counter the strength Elias had drawn from the flycap, softened.

Elias enveloped her and drew her down onto the floor. Her outrage relented to inherent sensuality. Elias was borne through veils of soft yet invigorating matter to a point of unprecedented joy.

As he withdrew, Aphrodite pushed him from her. She rose, as though untouched and declared again, "How dare you?"

Elias, cowed, backed away, the effects of the flycap diminishing. He said nothing. He avoided Aphrodite's eyes and left the silent house.

Aphrodite was suddenly before him, moving with alacrity through the olives. He saw her conversing with the guardians. They closed ranks. Elias knew they had been instructed to take him. He turned and moved as fast as his bulk allowed, back past the house towards the wild wood, its sinister mass touched by moonlight.

Ash trees, sacred to Poseidon, glimmered. Small voices wandered through the leaves. Were they the Meliai; ash spirits who sprang from the blood of castrated Uranus? Elias hurried past, yet felt small fingers brush his perspiring skin as though they would detain him.

An oak loomed with long branches reaching like the arms of Zeus himself. Its roots reached down as far as its distant branches rose; emblem of a god who would assume power above and below ground.

Elias smelt sour hawthorn; redolent with female sexuality; tree of ill omen and of the malevolent goddess Maia, who cast spells with its branches and whose son, Hermes led souls to Hell. Elias reflected how he had already intervened in man's future. Then beneath a mass of leaves, he saw the flycap. He grabbed handfuls and voraciously ate.

Women drift softly towards him from a veil of star-spattered light. They undulate, as though about to dance; lithe arms outstretched, but faces indistinct. Are they his women or floating figments of the mind? They turn with the deliberation of the dervish, gaining momentum, until as individuals, they are indistinguishable.

Elias tries to rise and grasp them, but cannot move. The fragrance of perfumed flesh merges with coalescing colour. This darkens; sour shades of imminent storm obliterating the women. A low wind moans and the air is tainted with the smell of smoke.

The king waits. He is in a labyrinth beneath the house; an inventive variation of that which Elias had twice visited at Knossos on Crete.

This maze is marbled and lit with long torches. Rare stones run through its veins. On the air drift perfumes of Egypt and Asia. The sacred king is motionless, waiting in suspended time, for his Queen.

Aphrodite enters, wearing only her girdle of seduction. She smiles, her black hair wound with particles of white marble and the flowers she had plucked that morning at the base of the black mountains.

The young king breathes fast in fearful anticipation. He feels her touch of tenderness and command. He absorbs her infiltrating lust, laced with the fragrance of the fields.

"Soon you will be immortal," she whispers.

Elias opened his eyes to see a spillage of pale sun on the fronds of huge ferns. The trees had thinned, and within moments, he stood on the woodland's edge. A mist swirled, forming unfamiliar faces and abstractions. He recoiled, suspecting they were authentic; the re-created manifestations of a lost era.

He associated the mist with Hephaistos and, as though on cue, the god reappeared.

"Old friend!" Elias held out his hands. Hephaistos did not respond but limped on towards him.

"Even you!" he declared as he drew near.

"What?"

"You and my wife!" Hephaistos growled, his ancient body primed with indignation.

"How did you know?"

"I saw. Don't forget my status. So what? I'm used to it. There are more urgent matters."

"What?"

"The king is to die. It is almost the Summer Solstice."

Elias realised time had been taken from him while in the wild wood.

"What will happen?"

"You will see. I can render you invisible so you can watch the ritual."

"I don't wish to. I want to stop it!"

"No, no. Life must be preserved."

"It can, without human sacrifice," said Elias.

"Impossible."

Elias saw no point in pursuing his claim.

They saw the great chariots being prepared in the sacred court before the house. Cream horses - small, yet swift as the wind - grazed by the house. There was no movement within. The priestesses moved restlessly round the court, primed for the sacrifice that would conclude their sacred year.

A chill wind rose like a harbinger of death.

Saul opens his eyes to see the blatant black mountains sprawled below. They are expectant in the early light, their contours sharp. But their blackness broods like a latent threat.

He senses discord generating savage incomprehension; the Strife perceived by Empedocles. Fire, the philosopher believed, was the divisive element. And among men and gods, Hephaistos, its personification, had returned to play a major part in the re-living of ancient conflict.

According to Empedocles, monstrosities were to materialise before the harmonious sphere was formed. As though spawned by speculation, they issue from the air.

Saul sees Aphrodite, limbless and disfigured; as incomplete as the relationships of Earth. Her head and girdle-bound body fluctuate. Her eyes swim with irrational and shifting shapes.

He sees, rising from the mist around her, the mutilated body of the sacred king. Its grim distortions howl and drift against her fragmenting form.

A man with the face of an ox appears. Others, headless follow. More emerge; a mockery of sexual integration; part woman, part man, their limbs moving darkly. Then lumbering forms with countless hands walk towards and through Saul.

He withdraws and the illusions founder and fade. Aphrodite is the last to disperse.

Saul sees the chariots assemble at the base of the black mountains. A straight track of beaten earth stretches towards the edge of the primeval wood. Cloud gathers. The mountains are ranged like mourners.

People from neighbouring communities converge, their anticipation laced with fear. They believe immortality will issue from premature death.

Five of the Queen's guardians mount chariots behind the straining horses. Aphrodite arrives, accompanied by the young king. He is copiously robed in red and appears drugged, his step unsure. Aphrodite seems even taller, her hair high, her limbs visible beneath a robe that moves with organic life.

Maenads surround them, slowly chanting. The king kneels before Aphrodite, his head touching the ground at her feet. She raises her arms and utters words Elias does not recognise in a voice encompassing the four winds. Her robe becomes the moon, absorbing light from the Earth, curving in a cold crescent around the king.

The priestesses increase their pace. Their intoxication dictates their dance. They dip and spin, the foliage that is strung about them writhing. The onlookers are silent, awed by the prospect of degradation and what they believe will be resurrection. The maenads slow, the circle breaks. They form a trembling, wild-eyed line.

The king precedes Aphrodite to the chariot. He climbs the gilded steps and, unseeing, grasps the reins. The guardians in the other chariots tense, reins drawn in. Aphrodite gives a sudden sign and the charioteers plunge forward.

The king is last to leave the line. He stands like an automaton, the horses charging, bits between their teeth. Clouds of black dust obscure the others with the intermittent glint of a gold chariot. The thud of hooves reverberates from the mountains. The crowd shouts with aimless release.

Two chariots collide. One, driven by the king, overturns. The other charioteer finds his feet, remounts his vehicle and drives off.

Aphrodite, waiting on a high rock at the finish, looks triumphant. The king lies motionless in the dust. No one sees who wins the race. Everyone watches Aphrodite step from the rock and approach the two horses dragging the overturned chariot. They rear. One wheel whirls off the chariot into the crowd. Aphrodite reaches for the horses. They calm and take something from her open hand. The effect is immediate. Their eyes dilate. They side step and spin. The chariot rotates wildly. Aphrodite unhitches the horses.

She goes to the unconscious king, kisses his forehead and gently binds him with the gilded reins. She steps back. The horses fling forward. The king is dragged, bleeding, through the dust.

The crowd is silent; disgusted and enthralled. The king is coated with black dust and it clings with spattered blood to the bolting horses.

At the end of the track the horses halt before Aphrodite. The intoxicated maenads run with manic shrieks to the queen, surrounding her on the crystalline rock. They lift their dust-coated arms, fling back their heads and howl. They begin a dance, synchronised with shared delirium, their pace quickening, their howls turning to bestial grunts.

Aphrodite looks over their heads at the maddened horses; bewitching the beasts, so they turn, swinging into view, the king's battered body.

Aphrodite steps from the rock, kneels and releases the gilded reins. She lifts the bloodied body and lays it before the maenads on the rock.

In a low voice she utters ancient words, while a cold wind wanders from the black pall of mountain and sky.

The maenads now wear masks; boar, lion, horse and sow. One approaches the king's body and with filthy nails, rips off the torn vestiges of red robe. The remnants are caught by the wind and lift pathetically away into the gloom.

The priestess watches them, then bends and with the strength gained from intoxicants, tears off one of the king's arms. Greedily she sinks foul teeth into the flesh and begins to rapidly masticate.

Blood runs down her chin onto the remains of the withered foliage hanging from her body. Her eyes close, as, oblivious of the salivating crowd, she gnaws the arm clean of flesh to the gleaming white bone. This she places with incongruous reverence on the ground.

A second maenad approaches the young man. She tears away his left leg and systematically begins to gorge. The others take their share until only the king's skeletal remains glimmer in the low light.

Elias, rendered invisible by Hephaistos, had seen the whole ceremony. Now he turned away to violently vomit. He had witnessed the manifestation of feminine voracity that throughout his life had been masked by suffocating seduction and care. Hephaistos, close to the rock and also invisible, saw him and smiled.

The crowd milled, sated yet mortified by events. Shakily, Elias walked back towards the house.

Saul flinches from the pervasive female force that enters every pore; a ruthlessness rendered by a goddess who could, conversely, have created Empedocles' sphere. He is beset by a weight like rank flesh and enters a blackly nebulous dimension.

Hermaphroditus walked through the undulating poplar groves. Physically he felt he was a man, his limbs lithe, with a tensile strength. But within, he nursed feminine fragility, a longing for some outer strength on which to rely. He wanted to seduce with soft promises and guile.

He reached the house of bones. Silence within. Shadows shifted but Hermaphroditus could detect neither man nor god. Then Aphrodite stepped into the centre of the room. She was still bloodied from the death ritual. Anxiously she wrung her hands, like a murderer who has just realised the import of her action. She walked towards the door. Hermaphroditus stood, invisible, in the sacred court as she passed, as though in dream, towards the woods.

Hermaphroditus followed, no more than a cooling breath of air, gently lifting her dark hair. Aphrodite hurried through the trees. Hermaphroditus pursued the scent of drying blood.

Aphrodite reached a wide woodland pool fringed with aquatic plants. She slid into the water which lapped up to her neck and splayed her hair like liquid jet.

The ritual bath after the sacrifice, thought Hermaphroditus. "That won't absolve what you have done," he said quietly, reaching the edge of the pool.

Abruptly, Aphrodite turned and stared at her son. His strange beauty shone through the loose green robe he wore.

"What are you doing here?" She rose angrily from the blood-stained water.

"The time has come to extend your king's reign," said Hermaphroditus.

"This is a conspiracy. Even you are in it!" The goddess waded from the water and confronted him.

"And you have deceived the people. How many know who you really are?" asked Hermaphroditus.

"I represent fertility. That's all they need to know. How I spend my time among mortals is my business."

Hermaphroditus absorbed the cleansed fragrance of her flesh. And was envious. He wanted to command and manipulate with a woman's wiles. Yet his response to her was that of a man. He would subjugate her and reign in her place.

He pushed her to the ground. He summoned his masculinity, suppressing her soft objection. When she eventually rose to pass palely through the trees, he had gone.

She thought of the dead king and the act of incest she had not prevented. Why should she dwell on them? She was untouchable. Then why did she feel vulnerable?

Elias saw her return to the house. The sacred court was deserted. The maenads had left for the black mountains to seek their own water for ritual cleansing. The guardians sat with a sense of anti-climax.

Hermaphroditus walked boldly from the woods. Elias peered through the half light. Man, woman, god? He was unable to decide. Hermaphroditus entered the olive grove. Elias followed. He saw the guardians stir and stare at the bizarre being who had arrived without a sound.

"Long live the king!" he said softly. The men were speechless. Adonis stepped forward.

"Hermaphroditus." The god introduced himself. "I'm here to help you establish a patriarchy. But transition must be gradual. I will take the first reign. I live between the sexes."

Adonis eyed him closely. Was he an impostor? Could a son be sufficiently ruthless to oust his mother? He had Aphrodite's eyes.

"No. The change must be complete. There can be no doubt of our intentions," said Adonis.

Hermaphroditus said, "Aeson is a good spokesman. Let him approach her and tell her the guardians will kill her son and her lover if she does not agree to this change." Simultaneously, man and god decided to wrest power from the goddess.

Aphrodite contemplates the quandaries of queenship. Should she return to the gods and leave the mortals to muddle through as they did elsewhere with an earthly queen? She is unnerved. Why have Adonis and Hermaphroditus come? She feels obliged to stay and assert herself.

As winter storms break, a deeper, more fundamental threat is perceptible; the defiance of Earth herself. In the house of bones Aphrodite closes her eyes, sees the ground forced apart; green growth uprooted and flung to the winds. The seas rise as the misused land slowly heats. The polar ice melts, the Earth is unable to adapt. It drowns.

This she must prevent. The king has died and been buried. She wills his baffled soul towards the basalt island. She feels the soul's dark flight through the rising wind and its low sigh on nearing the deserted isle, where it will live in limbo until being lifted to infinity among the stars.

Aphrodite was roused by Aeson standing squarely in the doorway.

"May I speak with you?" he asked quietly.

"I'm surprised you have the audacity," retorted Aphrodite, rising to a formidable height.

"Your men will not rest until you extend the king's reign," said Aeson bluntly. "Otherwise they will murder Adonis and Hermaphroditus."

Aphrodite was speechless. The presence of mortality was insufferable. Yet her outrage died on her lips. She felt her potency sapped, her resolve to rule by the shifting guile of the gods, depleted.

"Let me consider," she said wearily.

Aeson knelt in gratitude, rose and left.

Three days later Aphrodite summoned everyone to the house of bones. The guardians now knew who she was.

"I have decided it is impossible to extend the king's reign," she said bluntly.

Adonis stood in silence but vowed he would oust her. Hermaphroditus eyed her haughtily. He envisaged his own ascendancy. He would replace her and retain many of the matriarchal beliefs. Yet both feared her.

"Elias!" As Adonis approached him outside the house, Elias knew he was again fully visible. Aphrodite made no move towards him. She did not accept male privilege yet was too tired to press for his dismissal.

Cloud obscures the stars. The wind rises and wanders as though seeking consolation and, as the guardians listen, it becomes the lost moan of a man. Its strength grows, filling the fractious night, demanding recognition and rest. Elias knows it is the dead king on his westbound island.

Sepulchral, the isle rises before the men, with trees thrusting black boughs like the charred limbs of the dead. Through them flows a slow river whose depths are incalculable. On its banks the soul of the dead king waits to be set among the stars.

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Hecate

"What am I?" Elias was struck suddenly by a dual sensation, prompted no doubt by his androgynous encounters. He felt a resentment and awe; the kind his mother had provoked. And dependency. Might not the fate of Earth and its inhabitants depend on Aphrodite? Yet what right had she to suppress men? Tyranny could not be tolerated.

He yearned though for an integration of the sexes. Like Hermaphroditus? It need not be a physical manifestation. Yet without the physicality, could there be psychological mergence? He would retain his support for transition.

Adonis recalls the stifling chest in which Aphrodite had hidden him as she repented of the mating between father and daughter.

In the Underworld, he sees again Persephone, pallid from lack of light, lifting the lid, and enraptured, taking him to her palace.

He recalls Persephone later, as a gentle lover who would not return him when Aphrodite arrived in jealous indignation. She appealed to Zeus to settle the dispute, but he referred it to the muse Calliope, who ruled that Persephone and Aphrodite had equal claims on Adonis, but that he deserved a break from both.

So she divided the year into three equal parts. He was to spend one with Persephone, one with Aphrodite and the third alone. But Calliope forgot Aphrodite's girdle, which enabled her to claim Adonis entirely.

Now he would assert himself. Should he allow Hermaphroditus to live, Aphrodite would influence him, appealing to the soft parts that are feminine, reasoning that a woman should nurture Earth. What was more natural? He would relent, relinquish his manhood.

No, change must be radical. He would succeed with the support of Elias, Aeson and the guardians.

Winter possessed the land, deleting distinctions. The rain was soft, replenishing earth and green shoots struck like gems of tentative renewal.

Hermaphroditus shivered. If he ruled, what rituals would he perform? Would people respect the goddess, or evolve with patriarchal emphasis? How could he suppress the priestesses? How prevent the consequences of their intoxication? At those times they had formidable strength and would be a match for the men he would need constantly to stabilise his rule. Would not Adonis be more suitable?

No, he must try to strike a sexual balance. Compromise. Persuade. Why should the sexes not share power? Or was it essential that one dominated the other? Was it possible that qualities of leadership were found in men and women with little bearing on gender? Would Adonis accept that possibility?

Then he thought of Elias, the strange man in the olive grove. He did not seem to belong. Hermaphroditus resolved to speak to him.

Elias, re-instated as commander, saw Hermaphroditus approach. "I understand you approve of the king's rule being extended. Will you help me take over?"

"Of course. But what shall we do about Adonis?"

"We'll face that problem when I'm in power," said Hermaphroditus. But Elias could not envisage him in control. He had neither the ruthless seduction of Aphrodite nor the cold calculation of a patriarch. Yet he would support him.

His mother's influence enveloped him still. He remembered her occasional wrath; a storm darkening the house for days; the dread lingering after its abatement, as he watched her, wary of another outburst. If she - a mortal - had wielded such power, how might Aphrodite retaliate?

Would the gods wreak revenge? How could he succumb to such superstition? He came from the twenty first century. Man had self-destructed. But had the murder of the gods in men's minds contributed to that?

No. He was living in delusion. Yet here was his chance to exorcise the demeaning aftermath of a demanding mother, to participate in a patriarchal system that he could influence, avoiding the pitfalls of man's first attempt at civilisation.

Aphrodite wakes. She feels again a nameless threat; whispers in the keen-edged wind. She fears for the new growth stirring in the moistly nurturing dark. She starts at the small sounds of foraging in the night, unable to resume her fitful sleep.

Should she call on Hera and Zeus for guidance? She would go to the omphalos and wait for enlightenment. But as she ritually prepared in the dim dawn, the door burst open and Hermaphroditus, with Aeson and Elias, thrust into the room.

Aphrodite stepped back. She seemed to radically grow, her limbs touched with a pale sheen of gold, her face seeming, impossibly, to fill the room. She remained by the further wall, yet her presence was all pervasive. With a concerted effort, she summoned her last vestiges of power.

Briefly the men recoiled. Their limbs were like lead. They could not recall their purpose. Then Hermaphroditus approached his mother.

"Will you return to Olympus and let me reign?" he asked. He tried to look directly into her eyes but white light shone from them; blinding shafts of defiance that rendered his words ineffectual.

"Get out!" Her voice rose like a wind whirling into every corner of the room.

The men faltered and found themselves outside the door, retreating into the cold and comfortless dawn.

Later, as they sat morosely among the olives, Elias said, "She must have some weakness we can exploit."

Adonis moved like a beast primed for the kill. He waited for Hermaphroditus to leave the olive grove and followed him onto windswept land.

Hermaphroditus was swift, flexing the flesh of his earthly form as he moved towards the mountains. He entered an oleander thicket.

Adonis followed. Hermaphroditus heard the snapping of dry wood. He turned to see Aphrodite's lover close behind. Adonis smiled. Hermaphroditus stopped, sensing the young man's sensuality.

Adonis offered his hand. It rested softly in that of Hermaphroditus. Their eyes exchanged a clear intent. Adonis drew nearer and plunged the knife deep into Hermaphroditus's side. He fell and his eyes - incredulous \- clouded.

With relish, Adonis related his act to Aphrodite. He saw her diminish, her light dim. A pallor distanced her ageless face.

When next day, Adonis returned to the house of bones, Aphrodite had gone. Had she returned to Olympus? Adonis was suspicious. But, when after four days, she did not reappear, he pronounced himself in charge.

He pondered the essence of patriarchy. He would announce his decrees to the people and watch the women's faces. Their privileges would be withdrawn.

With the guardians, he left at dawn to find the maenads. Elias went with them, excited by the seizure of power yet oppressed by a fear of Aphrodite's reprisal. She had left too readily. He did not believe she had succumbed to Adonis.

The crisp air was tempered by spring. Anticipation stirred the greening growth. The wind relinquished the desolate edge of winter.

Unyielding, the black mountains rose against a pearl grey sky. At their base the earth was trampled with the evidence of frantic feet. The men followed the erratic footprints up the mountain until they neared the lilting lake, its surface plucked by the brisk breeze.

Beside it lay the maenads; drained of intoxication, their faces pale, their open eyes dulled and unseeing.

"Get up!" Adonis ordered. At first the women did not stir. Then one lifted her head as though in pain and, disbelieving, peered at the men. Others shifted and sat up. Had they been intoxicated, Adonis knew he would have been torn apart.

The guardians pushed the women into a mesmerised group and prodded them away from the water. Grumbling and dishevelled, they stumbled back to the olive grove. They slumped, like rag dolls deprived of purpose.

"Where is the Queen?" one priestess asked.

"She left. We didn't harm her," replied Adonis. The maenads looked suspicious. Elias was uneasy.

That night he lay in a fitful dream of women, once wild, now dark-eyed and subdued. He tried to rouse them, tentatively touching their flaccid flesh and murmuring encouragement. But they remained impassive. He half woke and when he slept again, was drawn back into the dream, to find the women still immobile and unresponsive.

Then he saw Pandora. The roses bled and grew. She walked towards him, shedding petals mixed with blood. She paused, looked him calmly in the eye, then dimmed, until only her compassionate eyes remained. He woke.

Adonis composed edicts of masculine law, raising groups of men to violate temples of the goddess, forbidding women to become priestesses and to worship at the new shrines built to a nameless patriarch.

The men feel uneasy. Images of Aphrodite haunt their sleep. She drifts, as though in dubious existence, but as they watch her wraith-like presence, she gains substance, swelling with authority. Her unearthly light returns, blinds them and she emanates a sour sensuality. The men are impotent, unable to move a muscle.

Ares had watched Aprhrodite. And still wanted her. He thought of their liaison and the humiliation of the net cast by Hephaistos; a symbol of the suppression of the goddess's cult. He watched Adonis murder and manoeuvre. And he saw Aphrodite veiled in island mist, moving through the land, unable to relinquish her authority, haunting men's sleep.

The land slept in the somnolence of summer. Aphrodite, passing in the veils of mist, erased the knowledge of the rain-making ceremony from Adonis's mind.

Repeatedly, he looked at the sky. It arced, unbroken blue. The earth was like iron, the vegetation parched. Adonis fell to his knees. Before he realised it, he had invoked Aphrodite. He pleaded for the memory of how to induce rain.

He felt her move within him, urging him to hunt, to seek the boar with the crescent-shaped tusks; representing the rain-making moon.

Softly Aphrodite drew Ares into her mind. He willingly succumbed. But now he froze and felt himself contract. He sensed the crescent-shaped tusks grow from his face. He experienced the base instincts of the boar.

When he woke, he was transformed into the beast; gleaming gold, his senses sharp. He had an urge to take refuge in the woods.

The trees closed behind him. He relished the dank growth; rooting in the dark soil, responding to the rustle of tenacious life.

He paused. The sound and scent embodied danger. Man. Adonis appeared. He was stalking some small prey. He paused. The sun, striking through the trees, bounced from the boar's golden back. The beast was motionless, watching Adonis with the god's eyes.

Then he heard the voice of Aphrodite. She ordered him to charge. Adonis stood sealed in shock. As the tusks ripped into his flesh, he fell. Instantly, from the dark blood seeping beneath his body, anemones sprang. And a light rain began to fall.

The fifty daughters of Selene and Elias, the surrogate Endymion, stirred in their island mist. They rose, to drift, part of the nebulous grey vapour that drew phantoms in the air. An urgent intimation reached them. Their sex was under threat. They must move.

Silently they massed. Almost imperceptibly, they passed across the sea. Like parasites of gossamer, they settled in the olive trees, listening and peering through the silver-backed leaves with their piercing grey eyes.

Their presence unnerved the guardians, who met in consternation to discuss how they should govern and defend themselves against the female threat of retaliation they could not define, yet knew to be imminent. They elected Elias as their representative.

The women saw the house of bones and heard the sighs of its lost inhabitants. At midnight, they approached and saw the saddened shade of Aphrodite, whose earthly aspect would have withered naturally with the phases of the moon, but whose authority had been prematurely usurped.

The men, seeking to establish a patriarchy, were unaware that while they had ousted Aphrodite, they could not yet halt the spontaneous waning of the spirit of the triple goddess. Her depletion from Queen to bitter old woman with an instinct for the black arts, could not be eradicated in their time.

Dubiously, Elias accepted his privileged position. But the house of bones echoed and shifted uneasily with shadows. He could not sleep. The daughters of Selene moved constantly through the rooms, invisible now, yet increasingly agitated, brushing like dry twigs.

They touched his face with elongated hands and oppressed his waking mind with memories of Aphrodite, who fused with his overbearing mother, bustling in black about his childhood home.

But the need to organise the people was a daily distraction. The women in the community spat at and derided him and continued to sacrifice to Aphrodite. The men used intimidation, even physical force in an attempt to prevent them but failed.

Elias feared sleep. He flinched from the persistent presence of the women; their silent insistence that he refrained from relegating their role and restored the matriarchy.

Then he sensed familiar flesh. The Empusae returning, linked in dark seduction. But as they approached, their faces changed. Loanga, the African he had kept in his house in a lost dimension, slithered through his half sleep; a disdainful smile on her black face, her bare body exuding eastern oils. Kekashan followed, dancing; her erotic chain leaping as she moved. Liv walked in her wake in her fine silver mesh and Eleni stepped lightly, swathed in wet weed and white shells.

Finally, Ritsa moved through his mind; her purity dispersing the sensual excesses. But Elias was powerless to move. His muscles seized, his mind numbed. The women broke their silence and laughed.

Throughout the next day Elias sat motionless. He could issue no dictum, suggest no way of consolidating the patriarchy. The guardians were also oppressed by the shade of Aphrodite, whose eyes probed their masculine presumption and followed their every move. Two disappeared, surreptitiously joining the women in forbidden worship. Aeson lost weight and was silent; his spirit sapped by Aphrodite's drifting spirit. Within a month he had died.

Formerly, the women had married in groups with other totem societies but paternity of their children was irrelevant.

Elias knew that if past events were recurring, the northern Hellenes had allied with the Thraco-Libyans and invaded central Greece and the Peloponnese. They were opposed by worshippers of the Earth Goddess but her shrines were being desecrated.

What of the Delphic Oracle? When Elias slept at last, Python, the oracular serpent, writhed into his dream. He reared and uttered a final cry, cursing man, as he was slaughtered by the Hellenes.

Elias began walking at random. He avoided the black mountains, taking a path towards the trees, massed across the plain. He smelt rodents, then saw tall white flower heads swaying like heaped snow against the blue. Yet their movement did not resemble that of plants, at the whim of the passing wind. It seemed independent, shifting quizzically as he approached. Hemlock. Sacred to Hecate.

The smell of rodents increased. It came from the plants. Elias suppressed his apprehension, attributing it to anxiety and walked deliberately through the hemlock ranks.

The sensation he suffered recalled the cloying presence of his mother as she aged and made increasing demands. Her egocentric attention was laced with vindictiveness; a resentment that Elias would not give her his full attention, after she had lavished so much, often unwanted, on him. The hemlock murmured accusingly, with her voice.

Elias tried to leave the foul plantation but failed. The dense white heads seemed to expand, now exhaling the fetid breath of an old woman. Elias punched at them and, to his surprise, they fell back, the small flowers scattering, some caught and carried by the wind, others heaping harmlessly on the ground. Breathless, Elias hurried into the trees.

He heard a rustle and hiss and turned to find the flowers had turned into a mass of black snakes, slithering sideways towards him. He clumsily increased his pace and entered a grove of black poplars. They moaned with the voices of women in distress.

He turned again. The snakes were coupling; knotted and darkly undulating in the dust; the loathsome familiars of Hecate. As they shifted and cast restless shadows, the land beneath them slowly opened and, still interwined, they vanished.

Elias was drawn to the abyss. He tried to step back and regain the black poplars, but some force directed his feet to where the snakes had disappeared. He gazed down. Faintly he could see them writhing and descending.

He thought briefly of Persephone, as he was inexorably drawn into the dark. He felt the ultimate sensation of the void; the sudden annihilation of life. Yet still he breathed. He felt. He smelt the dank intensity of the dark. He heard, far below, the continuing activity of the snakes. He closed his eyes. Then he smelt decomposition. Earth was mixed with the decay of human flesh. Still he felt. Or was sensation merely in his head?

He opens his eyes. He lies on an island of dull green moss. Sluggish streams creep like black-backed reptiles on either side. A tunnel of rough rock rises over his head. Dimly, he sees a boat moving through the murk. Can that be Charon, the uncouth boatman at the helm? A shrouded being stands motionless beside him. Is this main waterway the notorious River Styx bordering Tartarus? Has he died?

Elias hears the hoarse bark of Cerberus, the three headed dog, guarding the gates of Hades against intruders and preventing any ghosts regaining the land of the living. He knows now he is in the Underworld.

He feels the island beneath him shift and begin to float behind Charon's boat. It drifts past Cerberus, who briefly stops barking, his three noses dubiously raised in the air. Mist rises, moistly eddying around the shadows of trees whose branches hang as though in despair, scraping the dry ground. Between them vague forms wander - people who had made little mark on life and are left to an empty eternity on the Plain of Asphodel.

The island glides on through the impenetrable water. Light filters through the cavern. A field of tender green appears. Erebus? Clear water punctuates the field; the Pool of Lethe, where the dead without distinction come to drink. They approach, kneel, slake their thirst and at once, forget the past. They rise, reduced to nebulosity.

Beyond them, Elias glimpses aspiring white towers; the pretentious haunt of Hades, ruler of the Underworld. He sees the long line of dead filing, heads bowed, to the borders of the palace grounds.

He sees their judges; Minos, Rhadamanthus and Aecus, assessing each terrified ghost. Many, who had led unremarkable lives, are led back to the Plain of Asphodel, where, disconsolately, they linger in the half light.

The mossy island moves on and Elias sees a few ghosts, who had excelled on Earth, taken along another path to the Elysian Fields.

He is struck by sudden sun, the song of birds. Many are perched on a tall white poplar, lifted gently by the breeze and which was formerly the daughter of the god Oceanus. Music drifts like a drug and Elias knows night will never fall. The fortunate ghosts here have no need of sleep. What is more, they can, if they choose, return to Earth. But few do.

The island floats on. Elias scrambles to the edge. He will swim to Elysium. He drops into the black water which seizes and drags him down. He flounders, then feels bony hands beneath him. He is being carried on his back through the glutinous water. He is borne onto the bank. The hands withdraw.

Turning, he sees Hecate; wizened, almost bald, her ravaged skin hung in fibrous folds, her sharp green eyes fixed on him. Beyond her stands a gleaming bronze gate and high triple walls. Elias hears the moans of the ghosts, who on Earth had led ill considered lives and are now confined to Tartarus. He walks towards the gate. Slowly and without a sound, it opens. He tries to stop, but, as Hecate laughs with low delight, is compelled to pass through.

From a tree hangs a man; moaning and reaching incessantly for fruit on the nearest branch. Each time his hand almost touches the rounded, ripe fruit, it shifts out of reach. At the tree's roots lies a placid pool. The man looks down, yearning to drink. But cannot.

He is Tantalus, who killed Pelops, his son, and served his flesh to the gods, wondering if they could distinguish it from that of an animal. Realising this, the gods restored Pelops's life, minus one shoulder which was replaced with ivory. His father was taken to Tartarus.

Beyond Tantalus, Elias sees Sisyphus, who had been king of Corinth, straining to push a boulder to the top of a hill. He sighs with relief as he reaches the summit, but the rock instantly rolls down again. Sisyphus had chained up Death and for a long time no one on Earth had died. Death was eventually released by Ares.

The giant Tityus lies spreadeagled and tied with thick ropes. His groans shake the marshy ground. A vulture swoops to peck at his flesh. At the sacred shrine of Delphi, Tityus had attacked Leto, mother of Artemis and Apollo. They had saved her life by riddling the giant with arrows.

And Elias sees men and women of his own age; stunned and aimlessly wandering. Some are badly burned, as though having been exposed to the annihilating weapon or too much sun. Others are soaked with salt water; victims of the flooding seas.

They recognise him as a man of their time and, aware of his impotence, watch him with despairing eyes.

His mother in her perennial black, materialises from the mist. Elias flinches. Why is she here? Is this a trick of Hecate's to generate guilt? Yet why should he feel guilty?

She approaches accusingly. Elias tries to look away but is riveted. She is beside him now. He smells her slow decomposition and suspects little is left beneath the black dress. Her head drops suddenly like a puppet's whose string has been released.

Elias sees her rotting scalp. He cries out but makes no sound. His mother lifts her head. Hecate. She laughs.

The gloom of Tartarus disperses and Elias has a sense of elevation, from the cavernous lower earth to the land above. He hears the sea. He sees the high white crests of waves. Without taking another step, he is at the water's frothing edge.

Hecate walks lightly on the water beside the skittering stones and enters a weed-hung cave. Elias sees two cliffs; one of smooth stone, rising sheer into the pearl grey sky, its summit invisible. Stepping through the water, he reaches it and finds another cave, lit by pale sunlight, now slanting from the west. He hears a high pitched bark from within. Cautiously he peers inside. Vaguely he sees a half-grown foot twitching in the gloom. Then another. And more. Two heads rear suddenly on a long neck and as the creature slowly turns, four more heads appear; each mouth baring three rows of sharp teeth.

Two heads stretch towards Elias, who ducks and retreats up the beach. The beast reaches for a dolphin diving near the cave. In one gulp it has gone. Could the creature be Skylla, Hecate's daughter?

Elias looks along the beach of sand and ragged rock. He fears Hades. Yet he senses that there lies a means of regaining humanity, while the sullen sand leads to limbo.

Skylla has withdrawn her hideous heads and Elias walks carefully past the cave. Three rows of teeth flash briefly in the late sun. Skylla seizes his left arm and severs it at the shoulder.

Elias screams and clasps his right hand over the freely flowing blood but it oozes stickily through his fingers as he lurches along the sea's edge.

Hephaistos hobbled through the woods. Trees grouped and dispersed, whispering with satyrs. Occasionally he glimpsed a cloven hoof or heard a derisive laugh behind the leaves.

He thought of Aphrodite; the ideal flawed. How could he have hoped to hold her? Where was she?

He saw the green-skinned nymph through the sun filtering onto the woodland floor. She had hair the colour of ripe corn, swinging to her waist.

Hephaistos hurried towards her. She turned to him the wizened face of an old woman. Hecate.

"My daughter has taken his arm!" she hissed. The god was mystified.

"Skylla. Elias."

Hephaistos understood. "How shall we restore Aphrodite?" he asked.

"Leave that to me. Come."

The ancient couple left the wood. They might have been two harmless old people, walking placidily through their final days on Earth.

Elias heard the howling outside the house of bones. Was it woman or beast? He rose and went to the half open door. On the edge of the olive grove he thought he saw the fleeting forms of Loanga and Eleni.

He called their names. Low laughter from within an olive's trunk which opened with sensual implication. Elias cautiously approached. Within the tree, Loanga and Eleni were tenderly entwined. They raised derisive eyes. Elias reached into the tree. With a rush of cold air his hands passed through the women's flesh. They vanished.

In their place grows a squat black fungus, its surface swimming with Hecate's features. The face flows inwards, drawn into a darkening vortex. The fungus shrinks slowly, groaning, into the olive.

Elias retreats. He feels female skin slipping like silk through his fingers. He smells the fragrance of his lost women. In his mind, they turn into the Empusae; the antipathy of the creatures who pliantly fulfilled his fantasies.

He mentally rejects the Empusae. He shrinks from their pretence of conceding, while manipulating and depleting his manhood. They are in allegiance with Aphrodite and his mother.

Yet he still desires them. "I can dismiss them whenever I choose," he murmurs, his self delusion drawing him between their coaxing hands. Their warmth spreads beneath his skin, soothing, then demanding, withdrawing, caressing again, until he grasps in frustration at empty air.

Withdrawing, he sees the women finally wither. Then Ritsa's face is suspended in the rarefied air. Still young. Now turning into that of Pandora; fine-boned but marred with blood. There are rose petals in her hair. Elias reaches for her. She does not age, but slowly fades.

He sees the women's bodies grow limp. Their faces fall. The fine lines multiply; incessant movement obliterating their features, until only flaking flesh remains. It floats; fragments of lost humanity.

Elias curls on the ground and clutches his head in his hands. What have men set in motion? Will women recede, die even, leaving man without the means of fulfilment and reproduction?

Where is Aphrodite? When Elias looks up, he sees a skein of coarse grey hair drifting from the trees. The face within is faintly discernible. Hecate again. The hair begins to stiffen and spiral, as though sensing his presence. It writhes teasingly around his neck, tightening until he chokes. His past life flies before him, from his stifled childhood, to his encounter with Aphrodite. He must be dying. Then the hair loosens and falls away. Hecate has gone.

Hephaistos conjured his forge from the clear air. He was desolate. He suspected Aphrodite had returned to Olympus. The vegetation began to wither. The sparks from his forge flew onto the parched ground igniting small fires.

Hephaistos blew them out and strove to coax more golden women from the flames. But the gold repeatedly took the shape of Aphrodite; untouchable, deceptive. The embodiment of love.

Hephaistos drew her from the fire. Her eyes were alive in the seamless mask of a goddess. Mockingly, she smiled. He averted his eyes from the brightness. When he looked again, she had gone.

Elias swims through a swirling red sea. Has he died? He hears a thumping above his head. He is tightly curled in a foetal position. He is warm and reluctant to move. Suddenly, he knows he is in his mother's womb.

He panics. He tries to shift position, but fails to uncurl. He cannot breathe. He tries again to move and hears his mother groan. He is seized by a vengeful desire. He pushes, moves a millimetre. Another shove and he is turning. He gathers his small might and pushes again. His mother screams.

Elias senses a way out. He pushes towards a dim ring of light. He breaks out with a yell as his mother's voice tears the air apart. He has been reborn.

He feels strong hands lift him and cut the umbilical cord - a physical gesture that had not previously prevented emotional dependence on his mother.

Elias woke. His mother's essence remained; oppressive and dismayed. Yet the rebirth had forced him to face himself and his dependence on a dominant woman.

He felt free, as though this time the cutting of the cord had been more than a physical necessity. He was independent. Men could manage without sacrificial rites to a woman.

Who was Aphrodite anyway? Merely a woman retaining power as a self-styled goddess? How could the brutal sacrifice of a young man have any bearing on fertility?

Elias was a modern man. He emerged now with the rationality that had been perverted and replaced by the potency of a dream.

And he had changed. Now he did not fear or even resent women. He regarded them as complementary. To survive, men and women must co-operate, not compete. Men had been wrong to dominate after the collapse of the matriarchies.

If Elias had, in fact, returned to an earlier era, he had the chance at last, as leader of this community, to unite the sexes. Yet how could he? He was not built for such an onerous task.

Hephaistos and Hecate stood, hands linked, at the edge of the olive grove; the wizened advocates of the matriarchy.

Elias saw their figures, faint against the outer trees. They existed in the limbo between present and past, awaiting their chance to reinstate the goddess. He watched them, knowing their apparent fragility belied a godly strength. But he wondered, once more, as they remained motionless, if he was under an illusion.

Was his fear breeding fantasy? If they existed, could he not approach and express his desire for the sexes to share responsibility? But they would surely reject any proposal short of Aphrodite's reinstatement.

They, however, approached him. As she neared, Hecate changed; still faint yet hovering with hints of moon-steeped Selene, her initial embodiment, then fleshing out into the sensuality of Aphrodite.

Hephaistos remained an old god past his prime, clinging to the concept of the Mother Goddess, still hankering after the love he had been denied.

Aphrodite expanded as she approached; the most powerful element of the Moon Triad; her eyes reflecting the silent lunar seas.

"Unity. That's what we need. Not dominance." Elias heard his voice, distant and ineffectual, thwarted by the wind.

Aphrodite smiled. As she moved, her face was intermittently marred by Hecate's hollows and deep lines. But, on reaching Elias, Aphrodite was complete in every detail.

A grey mist rose. Or was it smoke? It swirled like sacrificial fire. Now Elias could not see the goddess. When the air cleared, she had once more lost her youth.

"I can't -" Her voice was unsteady. Vestiges of Selene and Aphrodite reappeared but rapidly receded, relenting to the loose jowls and hairless head of Hecate.

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Renewal

Saul was suddenly beside the house of bones. The olive grove was silent, the air redolent with death. He approached the house and walked through the open door.

Elias was sprawled on the ground, the careful clothing of an earlier era replaced by a loose, soiled robe. He was unkempt, his skin blackened by the sun. He groaned as he slept.

Saul touched his shoulder. No response. He shook him and Elias sat up.

"Saul."

"Don't ask me how I got here. I have no answers."

"You won't believe what I've been through," said Elias.

"I think I dreamed some of it," said Saul.

"Aphrodite is dying. I see now that men and women must learn to live together. Life is a balance," said Elias.

"That is my vision too. Body and mind. Woman and man. But we are not balanced beings. For every step forward, we take two back," said Saul.

"Are we supposed to influence the re-run of history by our experience?" asked Elias, "Will time continue to move forward, or will it recede and even stand still?"

"Hephaistos wants the matriarchy restored. He's pathetic - still seeking a mother's love. How appalling to be immortal in that state of mind."

"There's no reason why you shouldn't govern the people fairly. You can see both sides," said Saul. "You can banish sacrifice and supersitition and enlighten the lives of these people without selling out to technology."

"I wasn't cut out for it. Why not you?"

"No. I'm an observer. I just try to make sense of what's going on."

The men walked from the house to the olive grove. It was deserted. The guardians had vanished. They went to where a small community of people had lived between the house of bones and the Black Mountains. No one. Even their humble houses had gone. The men searched in vain. The people and the interceding gods might never have existed.

Then Hephaistos, who seemed even older and more bent, was hobbling towards them, quite close as though having just materialised.

"Who is it to be then?" he challenged, "You and your patriarchy or the reinstatement of Aphrodrite? And who is this?" He indicated Saul.

Saul did not explain, but said, "We want neither a matriarchy nor patriarchy. We want integration. Co-operation. No more competition. We want to change the course of history. This time no one-sided power politics, but the unity which Empedocles saw, becoming permanent."

"Then you are not men. You must be some species more optimistic even than the gods. Come on, I challenge you to defeat me. If you do, I shall know you have the unlikely ability to unite those elements in opposition and I will give you Pandora. You can govern as the next Triad." He smirked.

Pandora. The embodiment of original woman. Untrammelled. They could prevent her this time from opening the casket of despair. With her could they not live in harmony, uniting mind and matter?

"How can I defeat a god?" asked Elias, "I'm merely a man."

Hephaistos smiled and hobbled towards the woods. On the edge he paused and raising his ancient arms, summoned his smoking forge. This time, as he chanted in the half light, the golden women reappeared, not from the flames but from the mountain slopes.

Hephaistos opened his arms. "My wonderful women. Welcome back!" They converged on him, enfolding him in their gleaming arms until he gasped for breath. Behind them came the men who had been born of rock. They seemed reconciled, fulfilled, neither arrogant nor in awe of the women. They joined Elias and Saul, who knew now they would not be challenged by Hephaistos.

He was happy, worshipped by the women of his creation, loved at last, as he stumbled through eternity.

The night is starless. Mean winds blow from the ends of the Earth. The dry feet of Death shuffle through the dark. The men hear Hecate's hoarse laugh, sense her foul presence, yet turning, see nothing.

Then she is before them. Half her face has fallen away. The high dome of her head, white in the waning moonlight, spills from behind a cloud.

Her fingers are clenched, flesh flaking from the misshapen joints. Her diminished body is twisted as though by some vengeful hand.

The men pause, wary of her power. Yet her glazed eyes are spent. In their depths, successive images of Selene and Aphrodite wax and diminish, leaving motionless pools of remorse.

She steps forward and flapping bits of body flesh fall to the ground. The death stench overwhelms. The men cover their faces with their hands. They feel the waste of war and the thrust of cold technology, denying the female principle. They sense an unspeakable weapon that without warning, hurled time back on itself.

When they withdraw their hands, Hecate has gone. Her death rattle rises. The dying moon is swallowed by the cloud-scarred dark.

Elias opened his eyes. He was lying on the beach below his house. He knew instinctively he had regained the twenty first century. Saul lay beside him.

They rose and, dazed, walked towards the house. It seemed unchanged. Inside, the furnishings gleamed with an opulence that now seemed superfluously alien. Elias's chess board lay on the marquetry table where he had left it.

Elias went straight to the pool. His women had gone. He joined Saul on the terrace. The chequer board of marble and lava still lay in the sullen light. Sand drifted across its surface, but the men could see it had mysteriously expanded. There were now sixty four squares.

Pandora appears, bereft of red roses, her wounds healed. She is simply a woman - neither martyr nor ideal. She walks slowly across the board and stands before the men.

They know she is a symbol. She will not fulfil their needs. But there will be others, mystically born with men of similar disposition; hopeful children of the re-enacted past. Even as they watch, Pandora fades. Ritsa stands in her place. She moves towards Elias and as she nears, his arm is restored. He raises it to welcome her as an equal.

The ten earthen men stand on the chequer board's lower half. They form a tetractys; the perfect triangle.

Saul murmurs, "By him who handed to our generation the tetractys, source of the roots of ever-flowing nature."

"What?" says Elias.

"It's a quote from On the Pythagorean Way of Life by Iamblichus," says Saul.

They see the rocks beyond the board heave and split apart. From them, ten vestigial women emerge, their earthy surface slowly forming flesh. They gaze towards the chequer board and walk in triangular formation, to stand evenly on squares above the men. The sexes are equal, waiting for unification.

"The dream of Empedocles," says Saul. "They will unite, I know, through the will of Aphrodite; this is man's concept of love which was perverted. But now the strife and the pulling apart is over. This is the Sphere Empedocles sought."

Many miles away, the scientists who had released the hallucigenic weapon on the world, decipher on their indestructible network, the delusions of the men on the empty Greek island. The linked computer, achieving unity where man has so far failed, is the acme of technology. Even now, with the minimal help of the scientists, it is taking charge of de-humanised Earth.

Then the moon rises, already full, shedding white light on the land.

"To think we went there once," muses a scientist. "Will our internet ever extend that far do you think?" His colleagues gaze at the moon's face.

"They say it looks like a man but I would say that's a woman," says one.

Aphrodite looks down on the spinning blue sphere awaiting regeneration. Her re-established growth will choke the petty mechanisms of man as they communicate in sterile codes.

First, there will be her own rebirth. A slow regaining of primal power. But this time, she will have the option of yielding sole influence and heeding Empedocles's longing for integration. The process will be slow. She sees the men and women on the chequer board, sealed in dream. They are immune to computerised detection. One day they will respond to her presence and unite.

She sees Elias and Ritsa with Saul, motionless on the terrace. They are expendable symbols of sensuality and philosophical perception, borne on man-made dreams, through fear and association. But she is immortal. She can wait.

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### ********

Fool's Errand

Overnight the world's wealth vanished. Stocks and shares collapsed. Economists were baffled, investors distraught. In banks, the money cashiers took from tills, slipped through their fingers and turned to dust. Only gold remained. In a frenzy it was moved among vaults and traded by those who possessed it for necessities. Commerce closed. The art of barter was revived but lacked the original rules. Robbery with violence was quicker.

Fitzgerald had followed his father into the banking business. He had already planned each predictable phase of his life. He would accrue a small fortune before thirty and propose to the white-limbed analyst on the third floor. When he died he would be buried in the family grave in the village of his birth.

Then one morning he went to work to find the offices in uproar. A close colleague had committed suicide. Markets and computed calculations had run amok. Billions of pounds had been sucked into a void. And, as coinage and notes disintegrated, chaos culminated in brutality.

Fitzgerald packed his bags and pleaded with passing motorists who still possessed petrol, to take him to the airport. He knew people with gold stored in Europe. He fingered his credit cards, although they had been rejected from a week after the crisis began.

The airport had closed. People pushed impotently against the doors and yelled at dazed officials milling within. Fitzgerald did not join them. He began to walk away. He found a park where unwatered flowers drooped dusty heads. He concentrated on a clump of limp petunias. Momentarily, their purple faces fluttered. Fitzgerald closed his eyes. He had barely eaten for two weeks. The purple petals swam through his battered senses, washing in a sea of velvet until he lost consciousness.

Midas saw the gold heaped in the centre of the great hall. He winced, fearing another gift from Silenus, the satyr, who, in return for hospitality, had granted that everything he touched turned to gold.

Midas relived the anguish of confronting his gleaming household, the hunger as every morsel he raised to his lips, solidified. He relived his panic at the Oracle where he was told to wash in the River Pactolus. He had stumbled through darkness and doubt to the placid water, immersed himself and seen the river awash with gold.

Cautiously he approached the gold lying in the hall. He recognised it as tomb treasure. What was it doing here? Panic-stricken he gathered it in a goatskin bag and made for the river. He opened the bag and tipped out the gold. Wading in, he scrabbled in the river bed, the gold previously deposited there, floating to the surface. He thrust it with the tomb treasure beneath the surface but the sand was soft and repeatedly, it rose to mock him in the early sun.

Fitzgerald waded from the softly surging sea onto a beach of moon white pebbles. Behind, cypresses rose against a clear blue sky. Silence. No cicadas. No birds. Even the waves broke without a sound. Fitzgerald breathed the unsullied air. A land suspended in time.

He started towards the trees. They thickened as he entered. Voices murmured, grew louder. He thought they said "The river."

The trees thinned. He stepped into a flowering field. He saw a winking river. A man was frantically pushing at the water.

As he neared, Fitzgerald saw the gold. The man could not sink it in the water. He paused, exhausted, looked up and saw Fitzgerald.

"Is it yours?" Fitzgerald forwent formal introduction.

"No."

"Did you steal it?"

"No. I never want to see gold again!"

Under the circumstances Fitzgerald was astounded.

"Who are you?"

"Midas. And you?"

"Fitzgerald. You're named after the king?"

"I AM the king. Excuse me." Again he tried to sink the gold.

Fitzgerald, wondering where he was and how he had got there, assumed he had met a thief, deranged by the disaster. "Let's lay it out and take a look," he suggested.

"You do it. I'm through." Midas rose from the river and sprawled in the flowers. Fitzgerald surveyed the finely wrought jewellery from burials at Chersonesos, Zelenshaya Gora, Kul Oba, Chaian Kurgan and Pantikapaion. It came from around 300 BC and, as far as Fitzgerald knew, had been kept in the Hermitage Museum in St Petersburg. This was some thief he had stumbled on.

"Why don't you want this?" he asked Midas, remembering the legend of how the king sickened of everything he touched turning to gold. Midas did not reply. He had fallen asleep in the strengthening sun.

Fitzgerald gazed at the gold. The face of a vegetation god gazed back. Pan? He looked at the flower-filled land, the towering cypresses and river. It had the too slick feel of virtual reality. He heard a hoarse shout from the trees. A shaggy shape emerged and shambled towards him through the flowers.

"Have you seen her?" he growled.

"Who?"

"Euphemia. "

"What does she look like?" The creature was Pan, said to have been dead even while others on Mount Olympus were allegedly alive.

"Incomparable." But then he said that of all the nymphs.

A lithe figure rose from the flowers near the sleeping king. Her hair streamed with sunlight. She was naked save for a string of wild orchids which she twirled defiantly through her fingers.

Pan grunted and plunged towards her. He left in his wake a whiff of rank undergrowth. His hairy hands were raised pleadingly but Euphemia leapt aside and into the water. Pan waded in after her, caught and spun her body in his dark fingers and, in seconds, she had turned into a waving reed. Pan plucked her, slopped from the water and his ungainly hands began to shape a set of hollow pipes. He raised them to his lips. The sound was sweet yet sad, like a lament for the nymph he had transformed. The music woke Midas. He looked briefly at Pan, as though he knew him, then fell asleep again.

Suddenly Pan saw the gold lying in the flowers. He was too lazy to be acquisitive. He was cunning yet fundamentally lost because he had not known his parents. Hermes may have been his father. But who was his mother? Penelope - beset by opportunists while Odysseus was away? But that would render him mortal. Was that why people thought he had died? But he had not. Some said Cronus and Rhea were his parents. That, at least, would account for his early existence.

He had since taken refuge, minding sheep, goats and bees and contemplating his origins. The rutting beasts aroused his lust and he held an unhealthy fascination for the nymphs of the deep woods, who emerged to stroke his matted hair, gaze into his melancholy eyes and succumb to his bestiality.

Now he merely looked at the tomb treasure. And at prone Midas and the man from some future he could not imagine.

Pan bent and caressed the gold, not from greed, but for the characters depicted. The Medusa, Acheloos, the old river god he periodically encountered, Herakles, Athena. On top lay a bracelet with Thetis, the nereid and her mortal consort Peleus.

He edged away as Fitzgerald, unable to believe in the god's existence, joined him.

"Don't be afraid," he said, "I'm Fitzgerald." He offered his hand. The old god, who in folklore, came to represent the devil, cautiously responded. Fitzgerald felt a clamminess from which he swiftly withdrew. But Pan's eyes, consumed with curiosity, looked directly into his.

How could Fitzgerald tell him he had been inexplicably transported from the twentieth century?

"Are you a god I don't know about?" Pan said in a rush, unable to contain his curiosity.

"No, I'm mortal," Fitzgerald assured him, "But not of your time."

Displaced time did not bother Pan. He was so old, time had lost significance.

Midas opened his eyes, "What's going on?" he murmured. Pan looked at him strangely. "You gave me the laurel."

Midas raised himself on one elbow. "Pan! I thought it was you. What are you doing here?"

"Wondering where this gold came from."

Midas told of its mysterious appearance and recalled the music contest in which he had awarded Apollo first place for playing the lyre. Pan had challenged this and in a second contest Midas had given him the laurel crown.

Midas sank back into the flowers as he recalled the ass's ears with which Apollo had then afflicted him, the ludicrous hat he had worn in an attempt to hide them and how he had grown his hair long. But his barber had seen his ears and went to the river, where Midas had buried the first hoard of gold. He scooped a hole in the sand and divulged the secret of the ears. Reeds appeared and when the wind blew they whispered, "Who is it that has the ears of an ass?" The answer came, "Midas the king."

Now, here he was again, beset by gold that he could not bury and Pan who had caused him so much embarrassment. And who was this Fitzgerald?

"Are those the same pipes you played in the contest?" he asked Pan.

"No. Those were from Syrinx, the first nymph I turned into pipes. These are from Euphemia. I have to keep my hand in and even pipes wear out."

"Why are we here? Are the gods toying with us?" he asked Pan. The old god confronted the foolish and vacuous king and said, " I can prophesy Midas. I see us going to a dark and dangerous place. I see bloodshed and barbarism but ultimately, an enormous object that gleams like gold."

Fitzgerald listened attentively. He would find it. And he would remember where the tomb treasure was buried and return for that too.

Midas winced. "No more gold please!" he moaned.

Fitzgerald said, "I have come from a world where, overnight, wealth vanished. Everyone was seeking gold. Only that was unchanged."

He looked hard at the gold torque from the burial at Kul Oba. On each end rode warriors from Scythia; bearded, with long belted jackets, baggy trousers and soft shoes. Scythia was a land he had read of in the early accounts of Heroditus.

"We must leave," said Pan suddenly, as a cloud, like an omen, obscured the sun.

"Count me out!" said Midas emphatically. But he was compelled to move as Pan and Fitzgerald rose to walk through the shadowy flowers.

Suddenly they reached the sea. Drawn up was a high prowed ship, lilting and moaning with salted timbers that, in the shifting light, had a surface like darkened skin. Pan and the men cautiously approached. The craft heaved higher in response, then rested silently on the water.

God and men boarded to tread a deck that sprang beneath their feet. They went below. Bones were haphazardly heaped in one corner. The cabin was otherwise bare with again, a skin-like surface. The air had an unsavoury hint of slain flesh.

"Horses' bones!" Fitzgerald announced, shifting them with one foot. Pan and Midas were speechless.

Suddenly the boat heaved and began to move. Water lapped hectically at her sides. They hurried on deck. A green mist swirled and the waves, just visible, were flecked with murky foam.

The spiny head of an alien fish rose by the prow. Its broad mouth might have been mocking them. They were surveyed by a pallid eye. The creature was unimpressed and sank back into the waves.

The mist wove weirdly, yielding vague faces of embittered men, spirals of indeterminate intent and masses fuelled by fury. The glowering green was shot with red and the smell of slaughter grew.

The shades of untimely death congealed and the water rose. It slapped against the boat, breaking in dull green waves. Strange beings swirled in the spewing foam; scales flashing briefly in unearthly light. Their eyes balefully scrutinised the boat.

The water grew rougher. Foam broke on deck, the craft pitched and heaved to one side. Pan slid on his slippery hooves and grabbed at the boat's rail but it was snatched from his hands by the sea.

He fell back, hit his head on the deck and lost consciousness. Midas groaned and clutched aimlessly at the air, slewing across the deck to crumple in a corner. Fitzgerald clung to a rope, his feet spinning in the sullied salt.

The boat keeled. Then Fitzgerald saw the woman; wild with weed, her face absorbing the sea's sullen green, her bare body wrapped in more weed and slippery with intermittent scales.

With alacrity, she boarded the tilting craft, raised her arms and uttered an entreaty to the storm. Uncannily, it calmed, the foul water receding, the wild wind dropping to a whisper.

The woman took Pan's head in her hands. "You!" she exclaimed, "I thought you died years ago." Pan, regaining consciousness, opened one eye. His broad lips spread in a crooked smile. "Thetis?"

Midas gazed at the woman in disbelief. Fitzgerald knew of Thetis the nereid, but was unable to absorb yet another materialisation from the mythological past.

As she hovered as though half illusion, in the clearing mist, he was suddenly convinced, however, of her existence. No storm could have dropped so dramatically.

The sea lay now like gunmetal, barely moving; its hints of dead flesh no longer detectable.

"What's happening?" asked Fitzgerald, not expecting a rational response. And he was not surprised when the water was again disturbed and a man, also wild and weed hung, rose from the sea and clambered aboard.

"Peleus!" Thetis glided towards him. They embraced.

"A dark place," muttered Pan, " But there's gold for Fitzgerald."

Fitzgerald suddenly felt responsible for their brush with death.

Yet he had had no hand in events. He was borne on an inexplicable tide of time to a destiny yet to be revealed.

The boat began to move, nudging through the waves, its connotations of death evaporating. The skin-like covering now had the purity of newly stretched vellum, as though the strange beauty of Thetis had banished the unthinkable and restored sanity.

But as they rocked softly northwards, the sky darkened and hints of the indeterminate sea creatures reappeared beneath the water.

A wind wrapped morosely round the boat. The dark strip of a distant shore appeared beneath a pallid break in the sky.

"Land!" announced Fitzgerald, relieved.

"Yes, but which land?" grumbled Pan, closing his eyes to recall the green groves of Arcadia.

No one replied. No one knew, not even Thetis, who habitually swam from shore to shore.

The craft reared, gained speed and the land neared; bleak with damp vegetation and desolate tracts of stony beach.

Acheloos flowed high between banks of grass enriched by rain. He lapped around countless fish and washed luxuriously against tussocky outcrops.

In Scythia he felt most at ease. He turned into nine great rivers. Wherever he flowed he took the river's identity. Now he was the Borysthenes; a rich river in an untamed land.

The water widened and he was joined by the Hypanis river; another aspect of himself. The fields yielded to a vast low lying marsh.

Acheloos shivered, his self assurance tempered by the bleak expanse devoid of distinguishing features. He flowed softly, restrained, almost awed by the huge arc of sky, until curving to Cape Hippolaus and the temple of Demeter. He sensed the sea and swirled round the huge antacaeus fish, lifting them effortlessly out to sea.

Acheloos assumed his personification with curved white horns and a serpent's tail of glistening scales. He stepped onto the land.

The craft washed up on the lonely shore. The bemused voyagers disembarked. Midas and Pan looked with unconcealed lust at Thetis. She had the quality of fine spun silk that has taken feminine form. She looked only at Peleus, who, as a hapless mortal, responded as though in sleepless dream. Fitzgerald's unease increased. He recalled the panic of a wealthless world, his need for gold; the means of basic bargaining. But where was his world? How had he been drawn into the past?

They stumbled over coarse stones to where a river flowed into the sea. Rich land lay beyond the beach. They heard a thrashing near the reed bed and Acheloos emerged.

Thetis and Pan recognised and cautiously acknowledged him. Apprehensively the three mortals watched the weighty tail, the dipping horns.

"Where are we?" Midas asked.

"Scythia, where I live ninefold," said Acheloos.

"Why are we here?" queried Fitzgerald.

"I would guess Pan had a vision that's materialised. That's the worst of being a god," said Acheloos.

Fitzgerald said, "But I'm the only one who needs the gold. You see, the world's wealth has vanished. But why are the others here?"

"Time and intention have got confused," suggested Acheloos, "I wasn't expecting to materialise myself today. And, after all, you may find this gold an illusion. All that glisters, you know...."

He stood tall, thrashed his powerful tail, then slithered into the whispering reeds. The travellers began walking through the lush land. They ate wild fruit and drank from springs leaping like quicksilver from the loam.

An arrow flew past Fitzgerald's right ear. He looked at it incredulously, as it lay in the grass.

"Down!" shouted Pelius. Everyone lay flat in the grass. Distant shouts carried across the open land. Cautiously, they rose and saw four horsemen pursuing and loosing arrows, at two others not far in front. Fitzgerald recognised the pursuers as Scythians - identical to those on the torque from Kul Oba. He did not recognise the pursued.

The Scythians gained on them and brought down their horses with a final shower of arrows. They trussed the captives, cut their throats and cupped hands to drink their blood. Then they beheaded them and holding high the heads, slung the bodies across their saddles and galloped off.

A morbid fascination compelled the travellers to follow. Nebulous shapes on the horizon became identifiable as wagons. The warriors had reached them and were greeted by other horsemen and a swarthy man whose face was barely visible for black hair encrusted with dirt.

The travellers ducked into the long grass and crawled slowly towards the wagons. By peering through the grass they could see the warriors handing the heads to the tall man.

With a sharp knife he made a circular cut round the ears, shook out the skull and took off the skin. With an ox's rib he scraped the skin, working it with his fingers until it was supple.

Turning to his black horse, he hung the skin on its bridle. Then he began to pare the skin off the corpses' right hands and arms.

The bodies were systematically flayed and the skin stitched onto a wooden frame. The warriors remounted and left, dragging the frame behind them.

Fitzgerald retched and Peleus hid his head in his hands. Midas was clearly moved, recalling that before he had judged the music contest between Apollo and Pan, Apollo had played in one against the satyr Marsyas. The winner was to inflict the punishment of his choice on the loser. Apollo won and flayed Marsyas alive, nailing his skin to a pine.

"Men, gods - they're all savages," Midas grunted.

They raised themselves further from the grass. Two warriors materialised as if from air. With a yelp they rode their horses hard up against the travellers who were forced to stumble before them to the camp.

The leader addressed them in an alien tongue. He indicated they should be seated under guard while he examined them. He could make no sense of the shagginess of Pan who appeared to be some sort of livestock, the weed wound round Thetis's water bright body or Fitzgerald's torn business suit. He turned back to the skulls.

An artisan began to saw off the parts below the eyebrows, clean them out and stretch rawhide round the outside. Then the gilder stepped forward and began to gild inside the skulls. Fitzgerald glimpsed the gold. He would have those cups. And the rest of the gilder's gold.

Wine appeared and was poured into the cups. They were passed round and the mud-stained warriors were soon drunk. Darkness fell. The prisoners were offered meat of dubious origin. And a little of the bitter wine.

Beneath a sky where stars were cloaked by cloud, Midas watched Thetis glimmer in the firelight. The armed guards were motionless. Slowly their eyes closed. Midas edged towards Thetis. Peleus slept, overwhelmed by events. Pan and Fitzgerald dozed, half aware of Midas moving in the dark.

Lightly he touched Thetis, running his hands over the slippery weed. She shivered, relishing the tentative tips of his pampered fingers on her flesh that lay damply within the winding weed.

"Come!" Midas whispered. He raised her with one hand from the ground. The guards slept on their feet. The couple slipped from the fire behind the wagons onto the wind-whipped plain.

Peleus woke, sat up and looked for Thetis. Realising she and Midas were missing, he rose and, suppressing his anger, ran from the camp. The guards woke. Dawn was coldly breaking but the light was too dim to disclose the lovers. Peleus had dropped down an isolated incline and fell to his knees in despair.

Pan slept on, as though wishing to obliterate events. Fitzgerald was awake, watching the gilded cups that lay by the drunken leader.

As the guards were distracted by a loose horse plunging past the spent fire, Fitzgerald scrambled up and grabbed the gleaming cups. The leader moaned and woke. He lunged and wrested the cups from Fitzgerald. The guards took hold of him and thrust him into a dank wagon.

Pan woke and groaned. Finding himself alone with the malevolent guards, he concentrated on some timely shape shifting, shrinking each matted hair and his mud-soaked hooves. He turned into a cockroach and, depositing disease as he passed over the cups, scuttled from the camp.

The warriors were bemused and checked Fitzgerald was still trussed in the wagon. The leader poured wine into one of the cups and drank deeply. He clutched his throat with one hand and crumpled. The camp physician was called but pronounced him dead on arrival.

Fitzgerald heard the commotion and shuffled to the wagon flap. Lifting it, he saw the warriors digging a square pit. They laid the dead man inside. Unceremoniously, the physician slit open his body and began to clean it out.

Fitzgerald winced. Aromatics were brought and placed in the wound which was then carefully stitched up. The body was coated with wax and lifted onto a wagon.

Fitzgerald heard a scuffling in the straw. A cockroach appeared, swelled obscenely and Pan was standing beside him. Steeped in the extraordinary, Fitzgerald barely flinched.

"The leader's dead," he announced.

"I know," said Pan, untying him.

"The cups!" Fitzgerald leapt from the wagon and ran to where they lay in the mud. He thrust them under his coat and with Pan, left the camp.

"There will be more gold for you when they bury the leader," said Pan, "Until then we had better lie low. I can shape shift but you - " He sighed.

"I'm sorry. I didn't mean to bring all this on you," said Fitzgerald feebly. Pan sighed again and shivered. "Were the others taken by the Scythians? I heard Midas moving about."

"I think he left with Thetis," said Fitzgerald.

They walked away through the wind.

Thetis led Midas lightly by the hand across the plain to a great lake which was the source of the River Hypanis. Wild white horses with strange eyes grazed its banks. Thetis leapt on one and together, they swam the iridescent lake. Midas tried to follow but the horse he approached snorted and side-stepped out of reach. Thetis laughed and brought her horse back. But it remained in the water and before their eyes, turned into a hippocampus. It thrashed its scaly tail in the nereid's face. "He's our way back to the sea," she said as Midas reached for her in vain.

She remounted and, Midas, fearing to lose her, struggled onto the beast's back. They dived, deep beneath the water, through streaming plants and multi-coloured fish.

Thetis felt the pale green skin around her neck. It was bare and wrinkled with submergence in sea water. "My necklace!" she exclaimed as though in dream. "Hephaistos made such lovely jewels. You know I brought him up, don't you?"

Midas did not know she had reared the smith god but smiled and said nothing. Thetis closed her eyes. She thought hard about the jewels; the pendant with the large pearl surrounded by blue jewels from the sea, mounted in silver tracery, the golden image of the miraculous fish he had hung on a broad chain; the gilded dolphins that had swung from her ears.

Once he had shown her the tripod he had forged, which had run through coral and water weed on its golden legs. She had pursued it but the legs had contracted and it had become a gleaming flat fish.

"You too!" exclaimed Midas, "Everyone is besotted with gold." He touched her wet flesh. It felt bloodless. He saw the miraculous fish that, as she concentrated, materialised round her neck. It moved, as though influenced by water. Thetis raised a spiny hand to touch it. The fish began to breathe, expanded and, lifting on its chain over Thetis' head, swam towards the lake's edge. As she cried out in alarm, the white horses, dazzled, raised their heads and stopped grazing.

Thetis felt her bare neck, then the golden dolphins that now swung in her ears. She ran anxious fingers over the blue jewel that gathered the loose strands of water weed on her breast.

Midas wrenched her from the hippocampus onto the glistening floor of the lake, rolling her among nacreous shells and curious fish. She felt the strangeness of mortal flesh, excited by the blood that ran in man's veins. He did not move in her with the gliding of a god. He had weight and an urgency he could not contain. Yet she could not deny him.

The hippocampus waited, casting a cold eye at the lovers, until they disentangled and remounted. They moved into the river and Acheloos bore them boisterously downstream.

Pan and Fitzgerald saw the great fish gleaming in a shaft of sunlight. Astounded, Fitzgerald paused to calculate its weight in carats. How could it be netted?

They approached. The fish fixed them with a discerning eye as they stood in awe among the apprehensive horses.

"There is no need to net it," thought Fitzgerald, approaching cautiously. He lifted one leg over the shivering fin. The fish did not stir. Fitzgerald pulled himself onto its slippery back.

Pan shrugged and climbed clumsily up behind. With powerful propulsion, the fish slid back into the water and with Pan and Fitzgerald precariously perched, began to swim towards the sea.

"A golden cauldron," said Pan enigmatically. "That is the great golden object they have here in Scythia. That's for you, Fitzgerald. Unfortunately, we're going in the wrong direction."

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London

Dermot Fitzgerald rang his son for the fourth time. No reply. Outside his South Kensington home a mob of more than twenty people yelled obscenities. An empty bottle was hurled and shattered against the front door.

Dermot knew the world's wealth had vanished. His colleagues were in despair or, like his son Barry, had disappeared. He dared not go out. The people knew who had held most money and now rampaged through the rich men's streets, hammered at the bolted doors of Parliament and pitched bricks at Buckingham Palace. The Royals had taken refuge at Balmoral.

Dermot, divorced and whose housekeeper had left, went to the back of the house where the shouts diminished, and strove to muster his thoughts.

After another thirty minutes he could bear the isolation no longer and stealthily unbolted the back door. He crept like a criminal through the bare garden and the gate in the wall, leading to a narrow mews. He saw no one. He would go to Sam Hearne, his lawyer, a few streets away.

Sam ushered him into the apartment whose dishevelment was an extension of his own.

"Sit down, sit down!" he fussed. His shagginess had increased since he had been indoors, fearing the surge of looters and protesters outside.

"Barry's gone!" said Dermot flatly.

"Have you been to his place?"

"Not yet. I can't face the journey to north London."

Sam looked at his old friend compassionately. Dermot was a foolish man. He had wanted wealth ever since Sam could recall. He had helped him through repeated litigation when his plans faltered. He had advised him to avoid potentially ruinous ventures. Dermot had become increasingly reliant on Sam, aware of his instinct for pitfalls to which he was blind.

"What has happened?" he asked the old lawyer lamely.

"Search me! Perhaps we're dreaming. Have a drink." Dermot accepted.

"Let me drive you to Barry's place," offered Sam.

"Can we get through?"

"We can only get lynched."

They left in Sam's jaded Renault which drew scant attention. But the streets were stacked with refuse. Every shop window was smashed and the goods stolen. Lone people wandered as though in coma. One middle aged man grabbed a bony cat from the gutter and slit its throat with a knife. He began to skin it and slice the raw flesh which he ate from the knife's blade. Dermot looked away, sickened.

"How are you set for provisions?" he asked Sam.

"O.K. for the moment. I've a freezer full of stuff. And you?"

"All right for now. But what happens when we run out?"

Sam shrugged and narrowly missed a woman who had run in front of the car with teetering tins of dog food.

"I'll bet they're not for the dog," said Dermot.

A crowd had gathered at Camden Town underground station; people from every walk of life, flung together by calamity. They were disputing their next move. The concensus, as the car crawled past, was to call on the cloistered community of Hampstead up the hill. Their disarray merged into a unified thrust in the car's wake.

Sam turned into Frognal. The windows of some houses were already smashed and the occupants had gone. Others were boarded up. Sam stopped outside Barry's house. It was in tact.

Dermot rang the bell. It echoed in the hall. He rang again. No one came.

"I have a key. I sometimes look in when Barry's away," he said. Inside all was in order but steeped in desolation. The silence and faint mustiness of absence had already settled. The cupboards were well stocked with food.

"He usually tells me if he has a trip, although under these circumstances..." Dermot's voice trailed off.

"No note?" Sam looked in likely places.

Reluctantly they left. The crowd had reached Church Row. Most residents had left. Glass was shattered, doors bludgeoned open, possessions grabbed or wantonly destroyed. Sam drove fast, dropping Dermot at his door.

The next morning Dermot was woken by screams from the street. He crossed to the window and, looking down, saw a half clad woman with a kitchen knife, hacking at a teenage boy. Pieces of flesh fell with clothing from his body. The woman bent to pick them up and crammed them into her mouth.

Traumatised, Dermot sat for two days, then fetched the sedatives from the bathroom and, seated with his back to the window, took them all, washed down with a bottle of malt whisky.

Marguerite ignored the shouting crowd outside the flat near Sloane Square. She hung the pendant with the black sapphire and pearls round her ageing neck as though to charm time and halt its encroachment.

But her fragile face had fallen and her hair was dyed an electrifying red, like a defiance of disintegration. This merely emphasised the fear that fed her palor.

She added pendulous sapphire earrings to the gold strung pendant, watching their facets flickering in a deep black dance. She caressed their cold surface.

Now Steve was bartering their possessions for essentials with the few people who believed the monetary system was still operating somewhere. But slowly, even they sought only food. Goods were worthless. Dermot's lawyer Sam, was Steve's cousin and had given him food two weeks ago.

Marguerite heard Steve close the front door. She took off her jewels and bundled them into a metal box which she pushed to the back of the clothes cupboard. Steve came into the bedroom.

"It's hopeless," he said, "No food anywhere. People are hoarding. We only have enough for three days. I went round to Sam's again and he gave me a little. One of his clients - Dermot Fitzgerald - has topped himself. Took an overdose of sleeping pills. I think we met him once at one of Sam's parties."

Indeed. Marguerite remembered him seducing her in a disordered bedroom. She looked round hers - already denuded and now seldom a place of seduction. Steve approached. She knew that mix of supplication and reliance, imbued now with near panic.

A fair man; slim-built and nervously primed, Steve had found his role of provider taxing when the world had wealth. He was no competitor. Marguerite was his muse and she spurred him into scraping a living. Then her father had died and money was no longer a problem. Steve continued working but their possessions and her jewels came from her father's wealth.

Marguerite knew he would continue to exchange whatever they still possessed for the means of survival, if anyone was still optimistic or foolish enough to accept.

"Marguerite," he murmured. She knew that tone and withdrew. He took her hand, stroked her fingers.

"Where are those lovely rings you always wore?"

She trembled and pulled away her hand. He felt her bare neck, lightly kneading the flaccid skin. He drew her to the bed, gently pushed her back. Afterwards he took her hands again, stroking each finger as though recalling the ring she wore on each. And he fondled her empty ears.

"Where are they?" he asked. She was silent.

"Where ARE they?" he insisted. He dropped her hands and sprang to his feet. He began opening drawers. He threw the contents onto the floor. He pushed her aside and looked under the bed. He flung open the wardrobe and threw out dresses and shoes to reveal the metal box at the back. He dragged it out.

The blow from the porcelain figure fell on the back of his neck. He slumped heavily against the box and began to bleed.

Marguerite dropped the ornament and stood motionless for several seconds. Then, dazed, she heaved Steve off the box, opened it and knelt with tears streaming, her shaking hands touching the lifeless jewels.

Much later Marguerite rang Sam. She blurted out what had happened.

"I'll be over," said Sam. He disengaged himself from the young woman he regularly saw and paid copiously for sensual ingenuity.

"I have to go out. Don't go away," he said.

As he drove through the disrupted streets, he thought of Dermot, then of Marguerite. He had long watched her wiles; the innuendo in her eyes as she looked at him from across the room. She was fluid, like some creature from the sea. In his mind he felt her flesh. It would be smooth as a freshly trawled fish he thought.

On reaching her flat, the lift was not working and, breathlessly, he climbed the stairs. He found her in the bedroom, still kneeling beside the metal box. Steve - the blood encrusted on his face - lay beside it.

Sam held her shoulders. She turned her head and looked at him with half blind eyes.

"What shall we do? I only meant to stun him," she said.

"Take him outside. Is anyone else still in the house?"

"I don't know. It's been very quiet."

Sam left to see if the other two flats were occupied. Silence. He returned to the bedroom and helped Marguerite to her feet. The flat was on the top floor. With Marguerite's help, he manoeuvred Steve down the stairs. The noise seemed excessive but no doors opened.

"We'll hide him by that hedge for now," said Sam. They returned, climbing the stairs in a strange state of suspension. Back in the flat Sam put his arm round Marguerite's shoulders, still shaking from the effort of moving Steve, and drew her close. She was beyond objection and was seldom reluctant anyway, to resist men's advances.

She had sometimes looked in the mirror and wished for immortality - the opportunity to seduce and indulge beyond the small span of man. Did not everyone? She let Sam roll her over on the bed.

She was hardly aware of his noisy indulgence. Defensively, her conscious mind became opaque. She looked with blind eyes at the ceiling.

Then, as Sam grew more enthusiastic, she was repelled. She was aware of his weight and bad breath. She pushed him but he persisted, pinning her firmly to the bed. Eventually he slowed and Marguerite slid from under him. She ran down the stairs, past Steve's body she knew was concealed near the gate and out into the chaotic street.

Sam slowly found his feet and stumbled after her. But she had vanished. He went home. The woman was waiting. His senses feverishly exposed, he took her to the bedroom.

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Flight

Pan and Fitzgerald felt the great fish ease and swim to the bank. They were compelled to dismount and the fish began to shrink until small enough to again be held in the hand. Fitzgerald slipped it into his pocket.

Then they saw the hippocampus, his translucent head held high. A thick mane shot with reflections from the water rippled in the faint sun. Midas and Thetis clung to the undulating body as the creature thrashed his scaly tail.

Pan, perceiving Acheloos in the heaving water, held up a hoary hand and the hippocampus, rolling a sardonic eye, tossed his head and was slowed by the strong current.

Pan waded into the water. "So you'd leave us in the lurch eh? Leave us to face those barbarians alone?"

The hippocampus swam to the bank where Midas and Thetis dismounted. Fitzgerald was dazzled by the jewels Thetis wore. They shivered more than minerals. They were the craftsmanship of a god.

Pan chuckled. He would procure them for Fitzgerald. Thetis lay in the grass by the river. Now it was warm. Midas joined her. The hippocampus faded.

Thetis and Midas were lulled by the sun and lay back uncaring. Pan tried to straighten his crooked shoulders, took a deep breath and slowly exhaled over Thetis.

"If that old satyr Silenus could do it, so can I," he thought. Midas was caressing Thetis. Her brooch began to glitter. Gold. Then her face hardened and began to gleam. Her neck changed, then her breasts, arms, buttocks and legs turned to gold.

Midas recoiled. "No!" he leapt up and stood, staring incredulously at the transformation. He backed away, his hands raised defensively, towards the water. He fell into the river. Acheloos drew him down, until only a ripple marked his last moments of existence.

"What have you done?" Fitzgerald was appalled. Pan was baffled. "I didn't know I had it in me," he said. He looked at Thetis lying rigidly in the grass. Carefully he lifted the brooch from her breast and slid the earrings from her ears. He handed them to Fitzgerald.

He bent his shaggy knees and knelt beside her. Tenderly he touched her golden breasts and breathed again into her blind face. An eyelid flickered. Opened. Then the other. The metal melted, her flesh re-emerged. But the gold of the jewels remained.

The grasses stirred. Peleus appeared. He was distraught. He fell on his knees beside Thetis and grasped her pale hands. She looked bewildered, as though surfacing from another dimension.

"My jewels!" she touched her breast and put one hand to her naked ears. Peleus saw Pan hurriedly try to hide the gold in his matted hair. He passed it swiftly to Fitzgerald who dropped the brooch in the grass. Peleus hit Fitzgerald and the two fell, rolling fiercely by the river.

Fitzgerald forced Peleus' head under the water and held it down. Thetis and Pan rushed to him but Peleus was already drifting downstream.

Fitzgerald scooped up the gold and fled. Thetis did not move but watched the mortal stumble raggedly over the bleak plain. Pan turned to her. He relished her with his rheumy eyes. His lecherous limbs trembled. He grasped her and forced her into the grass.

Afterwards, as Pan lay sated, Thetis rose and walked shakily to the river's edge. The hippocampus gradually materialised. He watched her scornfully but waited while she mounted and, exhausted, leaned against him. He began to swim towards the sea.

Pan woke, found himself alone and, shrugging, set off to see if nymphs lived in Scythia.

Fitzgerald was mysteriously borne north to the country of the Gerrhi tribe. The king must have been a member, for now Fitzgerald saw six men burying him. Cautiously he neared and crouched behind an incline.

The king lay on a mattress which was placed in a tomb. Spears were thrust into the ground on either side supporting a willow roof. Members of the leader's household were lowered into the pit. They had been strangled. Then Fitzgerald watched horses being heaved in and gold cups, which he craned to see more closely. The grave was covered with earth.

At the end of the year they would take fifty of the king's remaining servants, strangle and gut them, stuff the bodies with chaff and sew them up. Fifty horses would be similarly treated. Around the tomb wheels would be cut in half and fixed in pairs to stakes driven into the ground. Thick poles would be driven lengthwise through the horses from tail to neck, so they could be mounted on the wheels, their legs dangling clear of the ground. The horses would be bitted and bridled and the bridles pegged down. The men would be similarly impaled on stakes with lower ends fitted into sockets of the stakes running through the horses, so each horse would have a rider.

As the mourners moved away Fitzgerald edged from behind the rise. He slipped unseen to the tomb and began scrabbling in the mud, seeking the gold cups. He found two which he thrust with the others under his coat, barely able to contain the gold. He could carry no more.

A mist drifted across the plain, until only the ghostly lament of the mourners was audible. Soon, even that faded and Fitzgerald was alone. He heard the river and for a moment thought he saw the bulk of Acheloos moving towards him through the mist. But the shape evaporated.

Fitzgerald clutched his gold. What would the cauldron look like? How was he going to move it?

A mourner, detached from the others, loomed suddenly from the mist. He stopped short. Then he hurried away, wailing to his fellow mourners. Fitzgerald began to run. There was brief silence. Then he heard the mourners howling like wolves. Now they seemed to be in front of him, the next moment in his rear. He paused and tried to gauge their position. Two grew from the mist, as though breathed into existence and seized him. Fitzgerald slipped from their clumsy grasp, running towards the slow sound of the river. He dived in and felt the strong arms of Acheloos bear him upstream. He clung to his gold which pulled him down but Acheloos laughed and kept him afloat.

Fitzgerald heard the people howling after him but the river flowed fast and gradually the cries ceased. The water spoke with the deep voice of Acheloos; a god of strength and playfulness. Other voices drifted from the plain; not of people but haunted intimations woven from the undulating mist. More shapes grew within it, advancing and receding.

Fitzgerald struggled from the water and checked he still had every piece of gold. He sat in the wet grass and took the objects from his pockets. The fish appeared to move slightly in his hand. The dolphins had dulled, the brooch now looked lifeless and the cups had the hard feel of stripped bone.

What was he doing? Even if he got home, would gold have any value? He replaced the jewellery in his pockets and the cups beneath his jacket. He listened. Only Acheloos murmured and a low wind whined. The mist was dispersing.

Fitzgerald looked in every direction. The plain reached to a dull horizon, its monotonous surface spawning phantoms. Fitzgerald twisted and turned to avoid their approach. But as they neared they faltered and dissolved.

Exhausted, he dropped to the ground and slept. The phantoms persisted in his dreams; wild men with hungry eyes, the remnants of flesh in their mouths and women, lustful behind long hair, matted with human blood and fat. Their pendulous breasts swung as they leaned over Fitzgerald, breathing foul air into his face. He tried to turn his head but could not move. One woman reached a bony hand to his forehead. The nails flickered and turned into gold-tipped claws. Fitzgerald inwardly recoiled yet wanted to grasp the winking gold. But the nails were sinking into his flesh.

He cried out, waking in darkness. The wind stung his forehead. Wearily he rose, weighed down with the gold and staggered on across the murky ground. It grew marshy. He was back by the river which flowed like a dim beast under a desultory moon. Minutes later, dawn lay pallidly on the plain.

Fitzgerald assumed the woman walking towards him was another figment of his fevered mind. But she did not dissolve. Her long black hair swung sullenly in her face. She was naked save for some crude cloth draped from her buttocks. She carried a spear and walked deliberately, with a loping stride, her tensile feet gripping the ground.

She did not see Fitzgerald until she was almost upon him. Then, as though sensing him on the air, she stopped, pulled back her hair and stared. She shifted her spear defensively.

Fitzgerald stepped back as she bore down upon him. His gold dropped to the ground. As she lunged with her spear, he caught her right arm, deflecting the blow. He pushed her back and she fell with a bear-like growl.

Fitzgerald placed a foot on her diaphragm and wrested the spear from her hand. She snarled. Suddenly her claw-like hands grasped him by the waist and pulled him on top of her. He was assailed with the stench of unwashed flesh, river mud and some pungency solely her own.

He recoiled, yet was involuntarily roused, responding to the woman's lust, as she clawed the cold skin beneath the remnants of his clothes.

She felt the jewels that remained in his pockets when the cups had fallen to the ground, but did not cease her gyrating, urging Fitzgerald to a frenzy.

When he rolled off her, she sunk her hands into his clothes, and, in one swift movement, extracted the jewels. She picked up her spear and ran like lightening across the marshy ground. Fitzgerald shouted after her, gathered the cups and set off in pursuit.

As though conniving with the woman, the mist rose again, swirling in layers of illusion. Intermittently, Fitzgerald thought he saw the woman streaking ahead. But the mist eddied coldly and she vanished.

Acheloos watched and wondered at the antics of man. With a sigh he gathered himself, drawing fish, water weed and the detritus of the tribes and hurled himself over the misty plain.

Fitzgerald heard a roar, was lifted off his feet and, with the startled fish, vigorously borne aloft. Fleetingly, he saw the woman riding the crest of a towering surge of water and mud. Her arms were flung wide, her black hair splayed, the jewels shot through the water and were washed from sight.

Still clinging to the cups, Fitzgerald floundered after the woman but was hindered by a barrage of bewildered fish and binding water weed. He stumbled by chance on the jewels lying dully in the mud. He snatched them up but as he straightened, his head spun and he fell into the muddy water.

Acheloos stood suddenly before him. The water receded as the river assumed the god's shape. He looked quizzically at Fitzgerald.

"Where's the cauldron?" Fitzgerald panted. Having struggled so far he was resolved to claim it. Acheloos shook his head, unable to comprehend the mortal's obsession. He pointed across the plain.

Fitzgerald stumbled in that direction, his feet sucking the wet ground, the gold clanking. His eyes were heavy with mist, his limbs felt like lead, yet in his mind, the great cauldron grew. Acheloos withdrew.

A whining wind rose, reaching coldly for Fitzgerald's face. His flesh froze, his legs faltered but, urged by will and the fear of want in the world he had left, he struggled on.

The cauldron appeared suddenly, as though conjured from air, on one of the plain's slight inclines. Mist still swirled and cleared as Fitzgerald reached it. The vessel must have held around five thousand gallons. It appeared to be made from arrowheads and shone as a pale sun filtered through cloud. Was it gold?

The wind produced deep clanging sounds as it encircled the cauldron, thrusting within the wide rim. The great bowl seemed to slowly breathe.

Fitzgerald heard a shout and looking round, saw the woman who had seduced him, running across the plain. She was accompanied by eight gesturing men. They reached the bowl and pursued Fitzgerald round the base. They carried spears and overwhelmed him as he began his second circuit. He was grabbed and manoeuvred up a ladder he had not previously noticed. They pushed him roughly ahead until he reached the massive rim and peered inside.

The mist and wind combined in a whining swirl within and as Fitzgerald teetered on top, he saw flickering faces through the mist. He thought one was that of Peleus, then the delicate bones of Thetis seemed to form and disperse.

The men pushed. Fitzgerald lost balance and fell. The gold dropped from his pockets. He did not hear it touch the bottom. He fell through moisture and biting wind. Wet fingers plucked his skin. Alien faces loomed and faded in the half light. A rancid smell rose from the cauldron's depths.

As in moments before death, Fitzgerald's past life flashed before him; his restricted childhood with money matters dominating domestic life; his family's increasing status and well being that were no brake on his father's obsession with a swelling fortune.

Fitzgerald smarted from failed relationships; women soon tiring of his earnest talk of financial fame.

The smell worsened, whispers from voices he thought he knew drifted up to him, growing louder, until they beat like great wings in his head.

Fitzgerald opened his eyes. The room was familiar. The sun shone strongly through the window. Cautiously he got out of bed. The floor beneath his feet was real. But his body was unco-ordinated. He moved with difficulty to the window.

Outside the street was subdued, in brief respite from the rampaging. But he felt he was elsewhere. He was aware of mist and a bad smell.

The phone rang.

"Hello!" he said.

"Barry, you're back! Where have you been?" Sam's voice. Yet it reminded Fitzgerald of another - whose? He was unable to answer Sam's question.

"I've bad news," Sam went on, "I'm afraid your father's dead."

Fitzgerald froze. Some other indefinable presence of death seized him, then passed.

"How?"

"Suicide, I fear. They happen every day. Drownings in particular. For no apparent reason, the Thames has been flooding. Covered much of London, providing an easy way out. We'd been to look for you. Where were you?"

Again Fitzgerald was silent. Suddenly a river of primeval force moved through his mind, then was gone.

"Well that's your business. I'll help you with the funeral arrangements," said Sam.

Throughout that grim day, as the mist thickened and a querulous wind moaned, a dark land loomed in Fitzgerald's mind. And the need to run, protect, outwit.

Marguerite and Sam came to the funeral. While completing formalities, Sam took Fitzgerald aside and told him of Steve's death.

Fitzgerald's sense of deja-vu increased. They went back to his house and sat uneasily in the damp back room. As Fitzgerald watched the unworldly look on Marguerite's face, he had a distinct sensation of water and faintly saw the wild weed that had hung about Thetis, flow over the sofa.

Suddenly, he remembered his father confessing his affair with Marguerite shortly before his mother had died and he sensed the wraith-like presence of a man who was the antithesis of his father; whose loathing of gold had led to his death.

Sam sat at the other end of the sofa, as though wary of giving offence, yet, in glancing at Marguerite, his lust was ill concealed.

The image of the old vegetation god danced before Fitzgerald; he recalled Pan's appetite for nymphs and orgiastic interlude. And, thinking of Steve, Fitzgerald recalled the young man who had pursued Thetis.

"Even gold is of no value now," Sam said, as the talk turned to economics. Gold. In a rush Fitzgerald's experiences returned. The River Pactolus, Scythia, the presence of the gods. What had become of Thetis and Pan? Were they in essence here?

Fitzgerald was about to relive his final descent into the cauldron, when Sam said, "I heard yesterday that the treasure from Chersonesos and other tombs has been stolen from the Hermitage. It won't be any use of course."

Fitzgerald sat motionless. He was cold to the core. He stared at Sam. The others saw his shock.

"What's wrong?" asked Marguerite.

Fitzgerald shook himself. "Nothing," he said quietly. He had overslept, had a nightmare, prompted by the financial crisis.

"We shall all have to help each other now," said Sam.

Fitzgerald got up and walked to the window. For a moment, in place of the damaged houses, he saw a bleak, wind-worried plain and on the horizon, the vague outline of an enormous bowl.

He shivered and it vanished but as he returned to his chair, his funeral suit was moist with mist.

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The Ichor Of Ilyus Benz

Danaus had fifty daughters. His brother had fifty sons. They married under pressure from the brother. Danaus persuaded the women to stab the men on their wedding night. In this story Ilyus is not pressurised, but the outcome is much the same. One daughter though does not comply.

The woman dances; a sea foam dervish in a black void, forcing the elemental shape of life to swirl under a starless sky. Her water wash is the only sound in infinity; the inscrutable ocean undulates, suddenly boundless.

The woman whirls, whipping white crested waves. Then pauses, a cold water column, to listen.

From the north a wind rushes with a clean momentum, plucking the dark sea into shivering peaks.

The woman reaches, clasps the wind and rubs it in her hands. From her foam flesh, a serpent coils, cloud-like, smoking on the water waste. It writhes around her. She succumbs, stretching foam limbs on the lilting sea and as she looks at the impenetrable sky, pin pricks of light appear, repeating the dance she delivered on the water. And with the reborn stars comes the motionless curve of a crescent moon.

The serpent disintegrates, its essence turning to cloud carried blithely on the freshening wind. The woman swells, buoyant on the water, yet conscious now of substance. She slows as the weight within stirs. She is the vessel of valley and peak, muscle and molecule. They jostle and juxtopose. She loses clear contour, is expansively absorbed.

The fifty daughters of Ilyus Benz walked through the flower-topped maze. Ilyus watched, identifying each head with a mind that was individual and knew a personal perception. Below the sloping shoulders, each body was identical.

He pondered on how cryogenics in the late twentieth century, had enabled the freezing of the human brain. When the craft of cloning finely proportioned bodies was perfected a century later, they were grafted to the heads preserved in liquid nitrogen.

To increase his bargaining power, as society archaically regressed, Ilyus had diligently selected fifty young women's heads for grafting and watched as each brain regained consciousness, panicked, then with careful therapy, adjusted.

These women had suffered youthful deaths, so retained malleable minds and unflawed skin. Each wore the fine fibre robes of the twenty second century. Each ate the concentrated food of the nutrient laboratory. But each nurtured her own thoughts and was haunted by intimations of the past.

Ilyus planned to marry them into positions of social influence and to be presented with the progeny of test tube exploration. No woman now gave birth in the former painfully messy manner.

Genetic engineering ensured children of talent and obedience, free of infection and the former need to radically rebel. But man had not yet mastered immortality.

Ilyus was astounded to hear that in the neighbouring district of Leucia, Zohan, another local leader, had selected the resuscitated heads of fifty young men and had them similarly integrated with cloned bodies. Zohan thought he too would marry his sons into positions of social influence. But Ilyus and Zohan discovered that the families of note had their own plans. They rejected the second hand; a de-frosted brain did not compare with advanced embryos in the laboratories of genetic engineering.

Ilyus sought the Oracle of Oziva. This voice issued from the wind that wailed around a limestone rock by the tilting sea.

He knelt in the unimpeded sun. The rock appeared to shift in the quivering light. Then the north wind, that had once been rubbed in the dancing woman's hands, wrapped with a wail around the rock.

"What shall I do with my daughters?" Ilyus asked.

"Marry them to the sons of Zohan," said the disembodied voice. " He has the means of immortality." The voice whirled away on the wind.

Bartez, who spied for Ilyus, entered the interlaced hills of Leucia. Composed of crystal and veined with gold, they were pulled, as though by an insistent hand, across the horizon. The pale green ground beneath his sandalled feet was flat.

The city of Leuciana hovered suddenly in a hollow. The buildings, in a range of clear minerals, were prismatic, emitting the colours of the spectrum.

Bartez edged through the disorientating streets. Few people stirred. He came suddenly on a garden, formally laid with curved beds of flowers, crisp as crystal which were a paradox of the static moved by light. At the garden's intersections stood black-barked trees hung with pulsating fruit. And in the centre rose a huge prism; a shimmering vortex of rainbows.

Bartez crept along the garden's perimeter; a dancing hybrid of glowing rocks and flower heads. He was dazzled on nearing the prism; the light rays were needle sharp. But he moved closer.

A shrill alarm. The prism shook and was consumed with white light. Bartez covered his eyes and backed away.

Zohan, flowing in folds of purple, rushed to the prism. The shrill sound ceased. As Zohan turned to anxiously search the garden, Bartez left and headed for the hills.

Hearing his spy's description of the prism, Ilyus recalled the oracle. Perhaps the means of immortality lay there. He resolved to visit Zohan to discover more and propose marriage between his daughters and Zohan's sons.

Ilyus rode a small blue-haired horse to Leucia. The creature shied on entering the streets of refracted light. Ilyus approached a reflective folly where instinctively he knew he would find Zohan. The building deflected the mind; its gleaming slopes and angles apparently inaccessible.

But as he neared, Ilyus saw the soaring arch of a door set with minerals whose fan-like facets seemed to open and close. He dismounted and as he approached, the minerals quivered and merged and the door silently opened.

Inside the walls and floors appeared to sway; a slippery challenge to the senses. Ilyus ventured through the main hall, carved with prismatic abstractions. The black and white floor flowed at optically baffling angles. At the end of the hall yawned a vast rectangular room with a reflective ceiling.

Then Ilyus saw the young men. They were ranged, motionless, around the room. Their headwear was cone-shaped and variously coloured. Below flowed identical lilac robes.

Ilyus realised that, like his daughters, their faces were diverse in character and held memories that moved through fifty differing pasts; striving to grasp a lost reality, unable to articulate or come to terms with the persistent shadows of time.

The first man seated on the left sensed Ilyus and turned a sallow face.

"Who are you?" he asked.

"Ilyus Benz of Oziva. I've come to see Zohan."

"Why?"

"That is personal."

Silently, with uncanny co-ordination, the men rose and escorted Ilyus to the end of the room. They entered another chamber of bewildering angles, where clumps of the crystalline flowers found in the garden, grew, it seemed, from the reflective floor.

At the end Ilyus could just discern the flow of a purple robe and the tilt of a tall headdress.

Zohan rose and advanced. He was hirsute, his deep set eyes, suspicious.

Formalities over, Ilyus said, "I have fifty daughters, each, like your sons, the creation of commendable technology. I propose they marry."

Zohan pondered. His sons listened. Although remaining motionless, Ilyus sensed their telepathic animation.

"Bring them to me," said Zohan finally.

"An impressive garden," commented Ilyus on leaving. He strained to see the great prism, housing perhaps the means of immortality. But he was dazzled as the colours shot chaotically into a cloudless sky.

Shahan, Ilyus's eldest daughter, sensed a momentous announcement as her father reappeared on the small blue horse. Her black hair curved about a face of sensitive withdrawal. Intermittently she was haunted by intimations of the past; childhood by a river that reached with consistency into adolescence. She felt a presence; anticipation, fulfilment, then despair.

Her finely tuned body, blending human tissue with a flexible form of plastic that followed the vital nuances of nature, moved faultlessly yet sustained a sense of alienation.

Memory, sensitivity, expectation, lay in her mind. They ebbed and flowed beyond her control. Spectres, delights, doubts. Past and present possessed her with a knowledge confined to what her father had imparted. This was scant. He had told her the essence of existence lay in propagation and that she and her sisters would be taken to young men with whom they would live and have children.

Shahan pondered this. She envisaged the contact, the growth, the responsibility. Neither Ilyus nor his daughters knew of romantic love.

Yet in her mind, that moved incessantly, Shahan felt the ghost of a half grasped emotion, a claim on her that excited, then depressed. From anticipation she plummeted to panic and deprivation.

The fifty young women, led by Ilyus and Shahan, mounted the blue horses and riding in twos, moved off; bright points of blue-borne light across the open land to Leucia.

The fifty sons were seated in the garden of Zohan. The daughters dismounted and were led by their father along the motionless line. As though confirmed by fate, each young woman paused before a man and inclined her head.

Shahan stopped before Lotz; fair faced with pale eyes where dreams appeared to drift.

He proffered a slender hand and almost imperceptibly his mouth moved, acknowledging Shahan.

Ilyus strained to see the prism behind the black-barked trees but was mesmerised by darting shafts of light.

The mass marriage took place in the great folly of Zohan. Prismatic pendants hung from ceilings and walls. Brittle flowers stood in jars in two long rows leading to the main room where Zohan and Ilyus waited in voluminous robes, to marry their children.

Shahan and Lotz, beneath headwear of crystal and flowers, walked first to receive the simple words of linkage. Telepathy already passed between them. Instincts of need and delight surfaced. They surreptitiously touched and trembled with anticipation.

Zohan invited Ilyus to stay in Leucia until their children grew used to married life. The men watched each other suspiciously; on a mundane level, bantering and discussing practicalities. But Zohan suspected Ilyus had an ulterior motive for the marriages.

In the round room that revolved with kaleidoscopic colour, Shahan and Lotz touched at last. They experienced the moving of a mutual mind. Their coupling was carried by spontaneity; compassion at its core.

Memory moves Shahan. She touches another man; a sympathetic shadow in a former time. They ride in a rapid machine. The man's hands turn a wheel. They are blinded by light. An impact. Shahan covers her head with her arms. Her body is violently thrown. But, miraculously, her head is unharmed.

Simultaneously, Lotz lies in dark dream. He is in surgery, the knife moving with cold precision, his heart beat increasing; panic, then his body failing and death seeping slowly to claim him. But his mind moves on. As his brain is submerged, shadows continue to slide through the intricate cells but slow and fade as the preserving liquid laps and leaves it in suspension.

And now Lotz recalls the white wards, the anguish and the hope that through surgery he would be cured.

On waking, the couple shared these recollections in silence. In their eyes moved those last moments before death, linking them now indissolubly.

One morning, Ilyus took Shahan aside and, lying, confided, "Zohan is dangerous. He and his sons intend to murder us and take our land. I believe they will murder you and your sisters in your sleep."

Shahan recoiled. She had never known her father lie, yet she could not believe that Lotz would betray her. She knew nothing of the granules of immortality Ilyus thought were in the prism; the motive for his deception.

"You and your sisters must kill your husbands. I shall provide the weapons and deal with Zohan."

Shahan withdrew; disbelief draining her strength. She watched, seeking signs of treachery. But she was inextricably linked with Lotz.

Ilyus knelt, mustering the magic bequeathed by the past. He willed creation of the knives. One by one, they lay, treacherous in the sun of the lonely shore near the city and finally, when there were fifty, the thick water weed rose and wove into a bag. Ilyus placed the knives inside.

His daughters consented to fulfil his wish that night. Except Shahan.

Darkness consumed the silent house. One by one the women stabbed their sleeping husbands. Some cried out briefly. Others died in silent shock.

Ilyus approached Zohan as he prepared to sleep in his starlit room and drove home the longest knife.

Shahan hid her knife and told Lotz, "We must leave. We are in danger." She stopped Lotz's protest with her hand.

"Trust me," she said.

Lotz felt her telepathic force. They left by the door leading to the long road that dissected the city and reached to the hills.

Ilyus summoned his daughters, reaching Shahan's room last, outraged when he saw the empty bed. "Lotz must be captured and killed!" he said.

The string of blue horses bearing Ilyus and his daughters, spread across the pale green ground as they rode towards the hills of crystal and gold.

Ilyus anticipated immortality. He and his daughters would know it in the two linked lands. Regeneration would be obsolete.

Shahan and Lotz ran from Leuciana. They headed for the crystal hills. "Tell me why," insisted Lotz.

"He thought Zohan meant us harm," said Shahan simply, "He has killed Zohan, and my sisters have murdered your brothers."

Lotz stopped running and spun Shahan to face him.

"You lie. That's impossible. Why?"

Shahan inclined her head and began to cry. The couple sat, sealed in the slow realisation of what had happened.

"My father will want you. He'll fear your retribution," said Shahan.

Lotz was silent.

"Look!" Shahan had seen the string of blue horses leaving Leuciana. The couple rose and began to run. Ilyus, followed by his daughters, saw Shahan and Lotz in the hills that undulated towards the mountains. Yet the crystal slopes drew no nearer.

Suddenly the land dipped and they were moving down a tunnel of glimmering green and brightly broken rock. Unearthly echoes carried from within. A dark shape, Ilyus believed to be a rock, shifted. An old man raised a weary head. His beard was unkempt, his eyes dull. Ilyus dismounted and signalled his daughters to stop.

"Who are you? May I help?" he asked.

The old man grimaced. "That I doubt. Unless you can give me mortality. Oh, the endless years!"

Ilyus recoiled. "Who, in their right mind, would want that? he asked, "Who ARE you?"

"Zeus," replied the old man. The name touched some distant chord of recollection. "I have the misfortune to be immortal," he continued. "How tired I grew of flinging thunderbolts and trying to tame that lot on Mount Olympus. Have you any idea what it is like to be obliged to make laws, pronounce oracles and be chastised by a jealous wife whenever you so much as look at another woman?

"Once, that lot on the mountain bound me with rawhide thongs so I couldn't move. Even the thunderbolts were out of reach. Luckily Thetis, the Nereid, summoned Briareus, who had a hundred hands, to untie the thongs.

"For that insult I hung my wife Hera up from the sky with bracelets on her wrists and anvils on her ankles. It was years before I could escape to this cave. And because I cannot die, here I sit, bored out of my brain, for ever."

Ilyus contemplated the ichor that ran instead of blood and was the essence of immortality, in Zeus's veins. And, unthwarted by his account, he thought again of the means of immortality he felt sure were in the prism.

"Immortality in itself can't be bad. It is surely how you use it that matters," he ventured.

Zeus sniffed. His eyes glazed. Ilyus backed away, directing his daughters to turn and retreat the way they had come. Back in the undulating hills, Ilyus looked again for Shahan and Lotz. Seeing only the dancing distance, he turned and rode back to Leuciana. As he dwelt on immortality, he fleetingly glimpsed the disillusionment of Zeus. But, more persistent, was his fear of Lotz and his concern for Shahan. He would ride first to muster an army, then return to take Leuciana where he would stay with his daughters, selecting a deputy to take charge of Oziva. And he would prepare for Lotz's inevitable return.

On nearing Leuciana, which he intended to bypass at a distance, he saw Zohan's men, armed with long lasers as they ventured on foot into the hills. They saw him and his daughters. The blue horses were urged forward, their feet skimming the pale green ground. They lifted a few inches from the surface and practically flew beyond range of the lasers.

The woman who had danced the world into existence, shakes her head and the hills tremble, the seas quiver, the dust lifts and flurries in her face. The north wind whines condolence.

Shahan and Lotz lay in a hollow between hills. They ate the small black fruit that flourished in crevices and their telepathy grew until they had little need of words.

Lotz said, "I must return to Leuciana. "

Shahan recoiled from the ensuing vengeance.

"This will surely separate us," she said.

"No," he replied but lacked conviction.

Ilyus tried to settle his distraught daughters, planning to fetch them when he had taken Leuciana. He massed his army. He mounted them on hybrid blue horses with green points, the colour of the ground. They were the fastest in his stable.

Zohan's men, in protective headwear and purple tunics, waited by the walls of Leuciana, as Ilyus and his army skimmed into sight through the hills. They fired their lasers, which the horses instinctively side-stepped.

Ilyus's one hundred men were armed with translucent shafts that, even at a distance, paralysed an adversary. One by one Zohan's force fell. The paralytic power hastened death and decomposition. Some lasers laid low Ilyus's men but most survived.

The struggle was brief. Zohan's small army was soon decimated Ilyus rode into Leuciana. He and his men dismounted at the folly. Ilyus entered. He was uneasy as he penetrated the silent rooms.

But no one walked behind. Then he halted in horror. Zohan stood before him; drawn to his full height. His eyes were motionless as Ilyus crossed the room. He wore a long white robe and did not move a muscle. Ilyus stepped to within two feet of him and perceived he was sealed in a transparent block filled with a clear fluid. It held him upright as though he had never died.

Ilyus tapped the surface of the block. It rang - the sound echoing through the empty room. Zohan appeared to have been preserved in the liquid.

Ilyus passed into the next room. He froze. The fifty sons were laid in two rows, sealed in similar blocks. Their heads were turned towards the door. Their open eyes stared, as though in accusation at him.

He rushed from the folly to the garden. The prism gleamed. As Ilyus moved closer, it threw out capricious lengths of light.

It danced; its prismatic tones coalescing and separating, confusing and taunting, turning into the woman who had created existence.

She whirls, a figment of light in the essence of life. SHE is immortality. She and the prism are one.

Ilyus could not approach. The light shot; defensively sharp, growing white with intensity. Then he saw Lotz and Shahan. They stood; one on each side of the whirling woman.

"Forgive me," uttered Ilyus, falling to his knees. Shahan ran to him. Lotz remained. The woman's dance slowed. The light dispersed. Where the prism had shimmered, only Lotz stood.

"Your father and brothers will live again," Ilyus told him. Lotz knew of the plans in hand for preservation. But he replied, "You have just seen the only means of immortality. We are merely men. Release my father and brothers. Bury them here, where she danced.

"Come with me, Shahan. I don't know if I can ever forgive your father. But I shall not leave you. Go home, Ilyus. Leave this land."

Shahan reluctantly dropped her father's hand and walked with Lotz from the garden.

Ilyus watched as they moved with measured steps towards the crystal hills, until at last they were indistinguishable from the pale green ground.

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Luke The Fluke

In myth Danae was the daughter of Acrisius who thought she was pregnant by his brother Proetus - not knowing she had succumbed to Zeus. He had been told he would be deposed by his grandson, so he banished Danae and her son Perseus. They wound up at the palace of King Polydectes. Perseus offered to fetch him any gift he desired if he refrained from marrying his mother. He was sent after the head of the Gorgon Medusa, who turned all who looked at her to stone. He cut off her head and on the way back released Andromeda from a rock to which she was chained, having been sacrificed to a sea monster after she and her mother had boasted they were more beautiful than the Nereids. On his return he found Polydectes threatening his mother and turned him to stone by showing him the Gorgan's head. Acrisius WAS deposed by his grandson - at funeral games, he was killed by Perseus's discus, swept from its path by the wind and the will of the gods.

The water lay like sullen glass on the Eastern Lands. Makeshift buildings stood on stilts and people were perceptible on the battlements of Norman keeps. The perverted weather veered from a heat unhampered by ozone to swathes of blinding snow and an unbridled wind roaring from the south west.

Boats randomly plied the sun-glazed water. The occupants of one, built impulsively from an unwanted sideboard, were roused from their limbo in the crystal light by the springing of a triton against their craft; its head and torso those of a miniature man, its legs replaced by a tail flashing with green scales. Within the week more tritons appeared, climbing through windows to re-arrange people's possessions and upturning boats.

Jonus, self appointed leader of the Eastern Lands, lived in a castle keep and spread a great net under his windows, entangling the tritons as they scrambled through. He found them acceptable when fried.

Then Jonus dreamed and the tritons were forgotten. "Your grandson will depose you!" echoed a voice from a great distance, as though straining to span the years. Jonus jerked awake, his sense of power rapidly receding. Nadya, he thought, my daughter - she will have a child.

The next morning he marched her to the top of the keep and without a word, locked her in a dim room that even the tritons could not penetrate. Numbed by his action, she eventually sank, semi-conscious, onto the damp stone. Deprived of a hairdresser, her hair flowed, thick and fair over her shoulders. She grabbed a handful and wiped her eyes.

The night was uncannily quiet. Poseidon, who had wildly washed the sea across the land, sighed and lay blackly beneath the moon.

Jonus was haunted again by the dislocated voice.

"Watch out! You will be deposed by your grandson!" it warned wetly.

"Oh no I won't!" he retorted.

But Nadya, tense in her tower, was that night beset by bliss as Zeus, in the guise of restless golden light, squeezed through the narrow windows and wrapped her in softness, then grew lustful until she was borne on waves of wonder and tireless desire until dawn.

Jonus could not deduce who had impregnated his daughter. He accused every man in the vicinity although it was clear no one could have entered the lofty room which each night was triple locked.

Nadya was also mystified but still warmed by a god-like glow. This expanded as the months passed. Looking from her window, she felt an inexplicable allegiance with the lilting grey face of the sea, the turbulent arc of sky.

As the time of the birth approached, Nadya's isolation from humanity grew. She felt she was no longer wholly flesh and blood. Thunder perturbed her in a particular way. She felt again the masculine weight, then lust and softness, succeeded by elation.

The child was born. It was a boy; small, with an unearthly sheen and already a full head of fair hair. He did not cry, but gazed at Nadya with motionless blue eyes. He was named Luke the Fluke because no one had been able to trace his father.

"You will be deposed by your grandson!" The words returned to Jonus in the sea-swept night.

The next day he made a hurried craft from an empty bookcase. He fetched Nadya and the silently disquieting Luke and bundled them in, towing the boat behind his own out to sea, where he released mother and baby on the trembling waves.

Poseidon lulled them. He was conciliatory. "At last, another son by Zeus," he murmured, unable to resist wetly caressing Nadya. She was still possessed by an ancient and alien force.

Night fell. Tritons played around the boat, opening small hands to offer Nadya a supper of silver fish. In a dream, rocked by Poseidon, who suppressed his lust with difficulty, Nadya ate the fish which tasted of ambrosia; the food of the gods.

The next day was darker. Poseidon could not resist some roughness, but he took care not to tip over the boat. He bore it up the eastern coast. Much was submerged. The remains of Peterborough rose precariously on the edge of a wide inlet from the sea. Grimsby was greyly isolated on an island. The boat surged on, up the ragged coastline until, weary of the diversion, Poseidon abandoned it on an island off Scotland.

Nadya climbed onto a bleak beach. With Luke in her arms she stumbled over low dunes. The land, soaked with excessive rain, appeared abandoned. Clutching Luke close, she pushed against the south westerly wind that had claimed so many lives, picking her way through sharp stones to the top of a higher hill.

Sprawling in the heather, she saw a low building comprised bizarrely of Highland stone. The wind whistled impotently round its dingy defences.

Nadya picked a precarious path to its arched entrance and confronted a dense door. She rapped its wet wooden surface. Luke cried, alarmed by the noise, his god-like sheen now barely perceptible.

Slowly the door opened. A bearded old man regarded mother and son with suspicion. "Please help me. I'm destitute," said Nadya. The old man, draped in a dirty plaid, appeared confused. He allowed Nadya to push past into the gloom. The dank walls held a smell redolent with a past that presaged a flawed future.

At the end of the passage, the walls ceased and in a large bare room with a crude fire lifting to a ceiling hole, an auspicious man swathed in three or four conflicting plaids, sat on a carved wooden seat.

"Who the hell are you?" he demanded as Nadya appeared. Her face was practically covered by her salt-soaked hair. Seaweed wove waywardly around the remnants of her clothes. Luke, in the crook of her arm was silent, a prophetic smile on his small lips.

"Nadya. I was wrecked. Please help us."

"Hamish." The tall man, whose eyes had the half-demented gleam of one who has lived too long in isolation, rose and held out a hairy hand. His feelings at being forced to muster hospitality, seemed mixed.

"Where are ye from?" He was hoarse behind his ragged red beard.

"The Eastern Lands. I was turned out by my father."

Hamish scrutinised Luke the Fluke, who gazed blandly back.

"Loose women!" he muttered, but placed a hand beneath Nadya's free elbow and guided her gently to a room disturbingly similar to the one she had recently left.

As storms savaged the island, Luke grew. Hamish who behaved like a hermit but was attended by three old men, looked lustfully on Nadya but did not attempt to take her.

But when Luke was twenty three, Hamish had a change of heart. He watched Nadya, and although her grace was diminished by loud layers of plaid and tangled sheepskin, he could contain himself no longer.

He suppressed his intentions, as Luke, grateful and in awe of the man, asked how he could repay him. Hamish smiled. Behind his beard, the devious movement of his mouth was barely perceptible.

"Fetch me the head of Morag the Miscreant," he said. "She's creating havoc somewhere up beyond Aberdeen."

"Who is she?" Luke, despite his desire to repay Hamish's hospitality, registered alarm.

"God knows. Some mutation from the mess we've made. It's rumoured she has a hand in the abominable weather we've been having. Perhaps she is just a foul figment of the mind. Anyway, I want her head."

Nadya, not suspecting the lecherous intentions of her protector, regarded her son with pride and misgiving. He seemed a fluke indeed; poorly proportioned, his fair hair now wispily thinning, his blue eyes proclaiming retreat.

But Nadya did not dare anger Hamish. There was no way off the island. Luke was curtly dispatched with an extra sheepskin and a half-eaten haggis. Nadya watched anxiously as he wandered aimlessly over the hill, progressing one step and being blown back two by the wind. By the frothing sea he sat and sadly contemplated the sand.

Suddenly, the haggis began to shine, then flattened and grew hard in his hand. It had become a shield with a mirrored surface. From this his sorrowful face gazed and he saw the cold lips move and query, "What shall I eat now?"

"Oh!" In his free hand, a golden sickle glinted, its great blade describing an arc in the dullness. He saw no one, yet felt a fleet, unearthly presence. The wings of immortality brushed briefly past. A voice, like the worrying of the wind, said, "Go to the Sullen Sisters. They will direct you to the nubile nymphs behind the south west wind. They will send you to Morag."

Luke looked helplessly around. Poseidon, laughing, lapped his feet. Feeling foolish, Luke held high his weapons and began picking his way through the hindering sand.

He was not instantly aware that his feet in their ill-fitting sheepskin boots, had left the ground. But, within seconds, he was hovering precariously over the lilting sea. The boots dropped off but he clung courageously to the sickle and shield. The south west wind whisked round him. Poseidon licked the sensitive soles of his feet. Luke was terrified, yet filled too with the ebullient air of freedom. He felt Fate was out of his hands.

All night he was borne above the waves. He whirled with wonder among the stars. By dawn he was approaching the shore. He was lifted on a high flecked wave and dropped gently on the shingle. The wind had turned, blowing coldly now from the north. The thought of nubile nymphs was intimidating. Luke followed the impulse of his bare feet and passed painfully over the sharp stones to a copse of strange trees, that, despite the wind, were motionless.

Tentatively he peered between their smoothly symmetrical trunks. Zeus had placed them there that morning. Luke walked within. The sound of sea and wind ceased. He was wrapped in a warm limbo. Drawn by a faint sound, he turned to see a nubile young woman swathed in red hair, sprawled seductively on the moss. Her green eyes glinted. She pursed her lips lustfully. Two more identical nymphs appeared. The first nymph rose and, linked by their undulating hair, the trio began to purposefully advance.

Petrified, Luke raised his shield and impetuously, swung the sharp sickle round his head. The nymphs fell back, fearful.

"Tell me how to find Morag!" Luke demanded, surprised at the strength of his voice. The sickle whirled again. The nymph in the middle stepped forward.

"Stay with us tonight and we'll help you," she said, her lust overriding fear. Luke lowered the sickle. Zeus manipulated time so the day disappeared. Night fell, a half moon touching the naked nymphs with silver.

"Put down your weapons," they urged in unison. Cautiously, Luke motioned them onto the moss. The nymphs lay down in a line, their eyes laughing and most of their bodies hidden by hair. When Luke did not move, the middle nymph, rose, took his hand and led him away from the others.

"I'm Artema. Don't be shy," she laughed. "Are you really a son of Zeus?" His mother had told him he had no father and since she now believed in immaculate conception, had revealed nothing of relations between men and women.

But Luke was reassured as Artema fondled his ears, brushed his lips and drew her hand slowly over his frightened flesh. He murmured and she lifted his hand which was instantly entangled in her hair. With difficulty he lowered it to discover the contours of her body. Their coupling was dream-like; Luke lifted through its motions by a foreign force. He was delighted when the other nymphs, Gilly and Fleur, repeated the performance.

At dawn, as Helios drove his chariot across the sky, dispersing cloud, Artema rose and held out her hands in which a silver pair of wings appeared.

"Wear these for swiftness on your flight to Morag," she said. Gilly stepped towards Luke. In her hands Zeus placed a dog skin cap. "Wear this to render you invisible," she said, placing it on Luke's head. The third nymph, Fleur, was suddenly holding a curious bag, woven from some unidentifiable material with flaps like a large envelope. "Put Morag's head in this," she said. Luke recoiled.

He found the wings attached themselves effortlessly to his heels, but he had difficulty holding the wallet as well as the sickle and the shield. Finally he wrapped the wallet round the sickle.

Artema led him from the trees and said, pointing, "Morag lives over there beyond the Cairngorms." Luke was loathe to leave, but Artema pushed him gently. "Good luck," she said. Gilly and Fleur emerged from the trees and, once more linked by their hair, stood in a line and waved, as Luke was involuntarily lifted off his feet.

The silver wings whirred. He rose steeply. He was filled still with the luxury of the love-steeped night. His invisible limbs slowly co-ordinated and he was stirred by unprecedented confidence.

But later that day Helios vanished. The sky glowered. The north wind whined.

Luke noticed the first ice figure towards evening. A young man had solidified in mid-stride. He gleamed in the grey, like a sculpture coaxed from glass. Then Luke saw a woman, middle-aged, swathed in plaids, facing the door of her croft. She would never enter.

He flew low and within the crystalline face of the woman, saw two dark eyes that seemed still alive, pleading for release.

He wielded his sickle, chipped her shoulder, wielded it again and with a heavy blow, sliced her in half. Horrified, he looked at the shapeless ice blocks lying in the heather. Two eyes still gazed from one misshapen piece.

He rapidly rose and flew fearfully into the dark. Loneliness possessed him. He was steeped in silence, save for the steady sound of his wings.

He heard the roar around dawn. Then he saw Morag, although initially he did not associate her with the nest of tritons writhing on her head in place of hair. From above, they appeared to be suspended in the dismal air, quarrelling incessantly in water-logged voices. They were larger than those that played at sea and they seemed confused at their convergence on Morag's head.

Luke landed thirty metres from where Morag rose monumentally. Most of her face was obscured, but intermittently a baleful eye was disclosed. Some instinct prevented Luke from looking at it. Below her neck the flesh lay in heavy folds. Claw-like hands protruded but Luke could see no feet. Her head dropped onto the fleshy folds and she began to crawl, lolling from side to side and provoking a fresh outburst from the entangled tritons.

Luke was not sure if she had seen him but stood his ground. She ceased roaring and plucked a particularly troublesome triton from her head. She placed him with deliberation by a rock and gazed at him for some seconds with the uncovered eye. The triton's tail turned glassy, the brittleness moving up his torso to his head where fish-like lips still protested but were unable to prevent the paralysis.

Luke the Fluke did not rapidly reason, but he could perceive what would happen if Morag saw him. Then he recalled his invisibility. Morag, however, sensed some presence. She shifted uneasily. Luke held the shield high for protection from her gaze. In the reflective surface he saw her and inched closer.

It was difficult to decipher where Morag's head ended and her body began, so Luke swung his sickle wildly and was relieved when Morag roared in anguish. Her head, with its embattled tritons, rolled down a slight incline, cleanly cut from her body that lay like a lifeless stack of old tyres in the heather.

Carefully, Luke edged towards the head. He saw the tritons grow limp, their eyes glaze in premature death. He unwound the wallet from the sickle, opened it, and with difficulty, bundled Morag's head inside. One large triton hung over the edge, but Luke was unable to detach him. He discovered the wallet had a long strap that had been folded inside and with this he slung it over his shoulder.

He was overwhelmed by a desire to see again the grim homestead of Hamish where his mother would be waiting. He did not sleep but ran into the wind, until his wings lifted him high above the ground. The people Morag had turned to ice remained below; immutable reminders of malice. But as he regained the coast they thinned until only moss-wet rock reared from the wind-swept heather.

Poseidon surged, trying to snatch back the triton hanging from the bag. But its lifeless body was firmly attached to Morag.

The black rock rose suddenly from the waves. Seabirds screamed. In a lull Luke heard another, human scream, caught and carried on the wind. He flew lower and saw, on the far side of the rock, a young woman squirming in chains. Her black hair, strung with wet weed, was whipped dismally across her face. The ragged remains of a nightdress fluttered from her body.

The woman could not see Luke but she sensed an excited presence. He swooped, like an overladen seabird and wheeled helplessly around her. Suddenly the sea heaved, parted, and a misshapen black head with bloodshot eyes, rose from the waves. This mutant, spawned in the polluted sea, lived on dark instinct, riding the currents, howling with its toothless mouth in shrill unison with the seabirds.

Holding sickle and shield in one hand, Luke impulsively opened the wallet. He wrenched out Morag's head. Her eye, still charged with lingering life, stared into the mutant's.

The hapless creature buckled. The huge head, frozen solid, sank and was swallowed by the sea, the circles of foam widening as she disintegrated on the sea bed. Simultaneously, the chains fell from the young woman and she slithered in alarm from the rock.

Luke could not swim but he dived and, dropping the sickle and shield into the sea, scooped up the woman with his free arm. He was amazed at the strength he had inexplicably acquired. The woman screamed again, seeing only a dead triton hanging from a bag. A gusting wind bore her off the rock.

"Ssh! I'm helping you," said Luke in a disembodied voice. She screamed again. He flew with her to the land, alighting with relief in a brown clump of bracken. The remnants of her nightdress had been snatched away. She shivered, tugging her wind-strewn hair defensively around her.

His mission complete, Luke regained visibility. The woman recoiled. He was wind and sea-swept, unshaven and flecked with seagull droppings.

"Who are you?" she uttered.

"They call me Luke the Fluke." He blushed.

"What is THAT?" The woman pointed to the bag in which Luke had crammed Morag's head. "It's better you don't know," said Luke. "Who are you?"

"I'm Zephora. My mother was jealous of me and had me chained up. What are you doing here?"

Luke doubted if Zephora would believe him if he told her. "Let's just say I was sent on a mission," he said.

Zephora looked askance at the triton hanging from the bag, but said no more. It transpired she was the daughter of McDunc, chief of the West Coast.

Night fell. Damp. Starless. Whispering with unworldly sounds. Luke wrapped Zephora in his sheepskin and they lay for shelter behind a rock. Emboldened by his night with the nymphs, Luke put his arms round the woman. She flinched in alarm, but as he murmured reassurance, she allowed him to hold her. She responded as though bewitched, as, Luke, a true son of Zeus, subtly seduced her.

"Come home with me," he urged her next day. She had warmed to his unkempt body, for he carried in his veins a measure of immortal ichor, the fluid that ran, instead of blood, through the bodies of the gods and which granted him the grace to move others.

Zephora climbed onto Luke's back, flinching as he lifted the bag with Morag's head.

His wings bore them through the malevolent murk, over Poseidon's heaving back, to the fog-bound home of Hamish. Luke landed and walked with Zephora to the door. A surly clansman answered the knock. When he recognised Luke he moved aside, glancing lustfully at Zephora, then in fear at the dead triton hanging limply from the bag.

As the couple passed through the gloom, screams spliced the air. Nadya. Luke lunged into the large room. Hamish was dragging Nadya by her hair across the floor. Confronting him, Luke pulled Morag's head from the bag. Hamish stared, froze, his eyes glazed. Slowly his body turned to ice. His face was suspended in shock, his limbs and dingy plaids gleamed.

Zephora sank to the floor in astonishment. Nadya rose unsteadily to her feet and stumbled, arms outstretched towards Luke, who swiftly bundled Morag's head back into the bag.

"He wanted me to lie with him and because I was reluctant, enslaved me," said Nadya.

Luke lit a fire. Slowly Hamish dissolved into a dirty pool of water in which pieces of tartan disconsolately floated.

"And who are you?" Nadya turned to Zephora. Luke explained.

"I'm proud of you. You must marry."

As prophesied, Jonus died at the hands of his grandson. Two months later, Luke returned to the Eastern Lands to participate in the newly launched water games. Special boats had been built for races across the lake. Jonus had adapted his original craft, so it gained speed to thrust alarmingly across the water.

Luke's wings had vanished the day he got home. But Zeus, outraged at what Jonus had done to Nadya and her son, endowed the innocuous craft Luke had hired, with a power that scattered contestants in every direction.

Only Jonus remained. Instinctively, Luke sped towards his boat. On impact it split in two. So did Jonus, to be eagerly devoured by hungry tritons.

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Loss

After killing the Minotaur, Theseus left Ariadne on Naxos, where she was seduced by Dionysos. Some say she bore him six children. Others claim she leapt from Palatia and drowned.

Britt resented the wind fingering her hair. It disturbed her frail equilibrium. The ferry was late. The lights of Naxos town winked, it seemed to her, derisively.

The Portara of Apollo's unfinished temple, loomed, too large to topple, on the island of Palatia in the harbour. To starboard the sun sank, an unimpeded ball of softening fire. To port the moon rose; full, gaining in cold and ghostly strength as the day dissolved.

Liam approached. He had been distant in the port at Mykonos where the ferry was delayed. He had been distant for days; a husband disgruntled with his profession in marketing, although he had just secured a vital deal. He had been indecisive about taking a holiday with her on Naxos.

She tensed, fuelled by her resentment of Liam's indifference, while he was aware his appeal persisted in a fair, strangely opalescent skin, height carried with confidence and a readiness to listen rather than expound.

Britt, at forty three, still lithe and darkly impatient, walked on coals, aware of her limitations of tolerance and talent, unable to temper her discontent. Ruled by the rejection of a disrupted childhood, she rode roughshod through life, devoid of grace, demanding with a shrill insistence that elicited results but left her friendless.

"Don't touch me!" she warned Liam, unwilling to accept the glib reconciliation of a brief break. She yearned to be tender, to declare her love, deny the encroaching quicksand. She flashed like fire beyond control, to wound and disparage, to discharge the venom.

Liam had been patient. But her exhausted silences, interspersed with fury, were irrevocably alienating. He was stiffly silent as they drew into port.

Britt is startled to see the faint figure of a woman poised on the edge of Palatia. As the moon gains strength, the woman leaps from the rock into the sea.

Simultaneously Liam sees, unsteady yet obdurate through drink, a man approach the boat at the quayside. Liam senses, shocked, he has come to claim Britt, yet as the boat docks, he vanishes, absorbed by limpid air.

Liam and Britt entered the basement; oppressive, although cool and sparsely furnished. Outside people shouted, the sound reverberating between high walls; the too rapid growth of an island town unaccustomed to strangers.

Britt lay awake, aghast at the barking dogs, raised voices, dropped objects on hard floors. Liam, exhausted, dozed; disturbed yet already lulled by the underlying rhythm of the island; relieved not to work the next day, not caring that it was almost dawn.

When Britt, in tears, roused him at six o'clock, he was disconcerted to discover he felt no sympathy. She had nurtured so many layers of neuroses, he could no longer perceive the woman beneath the histrionics.

But, needing peace, he found a smaller room in the fields on the town's edge. Britt quietened, the quiescence turning to an undercurrent of disquiet.

"This town's too big," she complained, "I have my own rhythm and I can't find it here." She sat morose, drained, oblivious of the timeless ease of the town whose Venetian core coiled in a labyrinth, suddenly warm with shops, then sullen and close, rejecting the curious, with streets ending abruptly in darkness.

Cats cowered, sprang or gathered to howl like young humans in pain. Seasoned stone and rotting wood held close the knowledge of old jealousies and love.

Britt felt her final frail contact with Liam absorbed by the wise walls and become an irretrievable part of the past.

Liam left her as she slept and took the boat to Paros. Britt found his note; succinct while trying to be tender and, in disbelief, did not erupt, but froze, withdrawing from the island; its elements of heat and high wind mirroring the harsh halls of her mind.

Britt reads of Theseus and Ariadne. And in dream she confronts the ice cold daughter of King Minos; the Cretan goddess of the moon. And she recalls the moon's compelling clarity on the journey into Naxos and its stark illumination of the woman on Palatia.

As Britt had helped Liam clinch his last deal, Ariadne had helped Theseus kill the Minotaur in the labyrinth. She had left Crete with him, and, beset by a dream of Dionysos taking her, Theseus had abandoned her on Naxos, birthplace of the god.

One legend claims Ariadne bore Dionysos six children. Another, that Ariadne, still in love with Theseus, jumped from Palatia and drowned.

Britt idled by the harbour. The artist sat, vacant and no longer concealing the debilitating effects of drink. His watercolours lay limply before him. He gave Britt the look of a beaten cur.

"Welcome to the island of Bacchus!" he said. She was not inspired by him or his work. She was borne numbly on the informality of the port, walking obliviously upwards into Chora, the old town.

She passed through The Strong Gate, now feeble yet redolent with the defences of the past and entered the Kastro where twelve castles once stood. Now only the ominous wall of the Crispi palace of the last Dukes of Naxos, rose like an omen of ill intent in her path.

She did not hear the artist approach. She entered a silent street where the walls on either side seemed close in clammy connivance.

The artist overtook her, hovering on emaciated legs and exclaiming, "Let me protect you dear lady. Clearly you are alone. My name's Daniel."

"I am not alone," Britt lied. He gently took her arm. She shook him off, saw the jaded eye shot with savage light and tolerated his grimy touch until they regained the harbour.

"Goodnight!" she said decisively, walking away. He did not follow.

The Meltemi howls and batters the house in the fields. On its fury ride ghosts; victims of the ancient tyrant Lygdamis.

And at Apollonas on the northern cost, the great unfinished Kouros stirs in the unalleviated pain of being abandoned; his limbs, half-wrought, his face still a figment of the sculptor's mind, the unwieldy body bruised by wind, sun, the urge to belong.

Britt hired a jeep for distraction and discovery. She left the harbour to cross the fertile plain of Livadi, turning periodically to look down on Naxos town, crystallised against the blue.

The hills unfolded; dun, dull green, September dry, waiting for the winter rain to rush - renewal from the purity of marble.

She drove dangerously, fighting a worn gear box, along the road to Filoti, where the valley deepened and the shadow grew more ponderous. Mount Za rose; a dour peak primed with power.

The road climbed and a sense of remoteness settled as Filoti diminished, toy-like below. The engine stalled. The jeep shuddered to a halt. Britt was steeped in a silence indifferent to man, yet felt the awesome peaks were listening. She could not restart the engine and was at least three kilometres from Filoti. No motorists passed.

She climbed out, felt the force of sun-soaked silence, was humbled by the implacability of Mount Za, named after Zeus, father of Dionysos.

Below, on the steep slope around which the road winds, she hears women's laughter. She sees no one, but is brushed briefly by the rank smell of goat and stale wine and is possessed by the fleeting force of intoxication.

The women's laughter grows louder, following this sense of frolic and instability. Britt dizzily fights to regain focus on the shimmering slopes. The laughter recedes; hollow, unreal, and silence seeps back.

The young man appeared suddenly from the hot haze. He drove a small truck piled with building materials. Britt stood squarely in the middle of the road and stopped him. He was affably co-operative.

Fifteen minutes later she had resumed her journey, the jeep shuddering with reluctance but inching - as though in apprehension - along the precipitous road.

She finally reached Apollon, jerking up the rugged track to the abandoned Kouros, barely distinguishable from the great blocks of unhewn marble.

He lay featureless; a crudely vestigial replica of Dionysos. Why was he abandoned? For technical reasons, the death of a client or through the intervention of political events?

Lygdamis, who seized power in 540 BC, confiscated the works in marble ordered by the rich but had trouble disposing of them, so sold some back to their owners.

The Great Kouri emerged after small idols of the old earth deities, also abundant on Naxos. Representing heroes or gods, the Kouri were known as "Ellinas"; the Greek.

Sadly Britt left the maladroit body and lurched back along the same - and only surfaced - road. She accelerated on passing Mount Za, fearing the force of enchantment.

Early evening. The balm of normality on Naxos Town, the way of the visitor smoothed by the Greeks' gift for adaptability; the commercial core bearing the charmed edge of unpretentiousness.

She saw Daniel dancing on his goat-like legs along the quay, pursued by three wild-haired women. When he sat down to paint, they squatted beside him and began plaiting braids into bracelets which they held out doubtfully to tourists.

Their eyes were glazed, their minds removed from the hectic harbour. They were high.

Britt recalled the laughter on Mount Za and the maenads who followed Dionysos, addicted to laurel; blindly sensual disciples mindlessly fulfilling his drunken dictates.

Denying she was drawn to Daniel, she returned to the windswept house in the fields where the lonely day in the mountains moved through her mind; the recklessness of sunshot illusion, the silent anguish of the Kouros.

The following night she found Daniel alone, depressed, his pictures unsold. She allowed him to lead her deep into old Chora, to a small restaurant where he was known and tolerated. As they ate and he drank the harsh island wine, he talked, his account of the past unexpectedly lucid, as though some spirit of eloquence had marshalled for her benefit, his random recollections.

"I was the son of my father's mistress," he told her, "His wife never forgave him. I think my mother died from the disappointment of not being able to keep up with my father. He was an exceptional engineer. Anyway she got cancer and died when I was three.

"Lou, my father's wife, threatened to kill me and my father. I was farmed out to relatives and left them as soon as I was old enough to join the navy. I've drunk my way twice round the world. Before I met you I worked on the ferry from Mykonos. One night I fell out with most of the crew - I'd been on the raki for three days. I placated them by persuading them to join me. The captain, of course, was sober and we all got fired."

As usual that night, Britt remained alone but with an insight into Daniel's instability. Yet she was reluctant to relent to the persuasive warmth he generated in the mellow mood preceding alcoholic decline.

Britt, who had been an amateur artist, began to sketch aspects of old Chora and the following night, to gain a new perspective, walked across the causeway to Palatia. On her right, crested waves rose, savaging the shore by the Grotta where rock reared like torn teeth. Beneath the waves lay lost Naxos; houses that had succumbed as the sea rose, leaving Palatia, once perhaps the highest point, exposed.

Had the Portara been the beginning of a temple to Apollo, born on the nearby island of Delos, where the Naxiots sent marble lions in his honour? Or was it another acknowledgment of Dionysos? Much of the marble from the ruins had been used to build the city.

Britt stood beside the great arch and wondered at the succession of hands that had touched it, the feet that had filed by its base.

She looks towards Delos and hears briefly the unearthly sound of a lyre. She recalls Apollo, whose cattle had been stolen by Hermes and who had made from one beast the lyre which Apollo was to covet.

Apollo. The God of Music, mooting moderation while Dionysos personified excess. The notes drift and die. Had they been the wanton play of wind?

Remembering stability, Britt thought of Liam; his guts, reliability, and regretted her churlishness. The two weeks they had planned to stay on Naxos were almost over.

One night Daniel said, "Why not stay with me until the end of the season? You're a painter You can sell your work on my pitch."

Britt contemplated the home she had left, already cold with chasms where love once lay. Would Liam return early, wait for her? Or was his leaving final? Would she go back to find the house still locked, or sold? She had no wish to return yet. She would stay, and telephone in a week or two.

She painted and sold well, with increasing sympathy for Daniel, who invested his impression of Chora with an air of inebriation and sold very few. His wild-haired women thinned, their vision drugged and distorted.

Britt was lulled by sun, wind, Daniel's anecdotes. One night he proposed. A few weeks ago she would have smiled and walked away. Now, appreciating his past and struggle for a stable present, she looked into his eyes and saw in them, herself; pensively poised.

Two weeks later in the small apartment by the harbour she now shared with Daniel, Britt agreed to marry him. She would seek a divorce on the grounds of Liam's desertion. Britt was stimulated by her work, the amiability of Daniel's few close friends. She felt her flesh expand, her nervous energy subside and be absorbed by a measured and manageable routine.

Daniel's hell-raising days were done. Now, when drunk, he simply slept. She doubted he had long to live. He was emaciated, no longer virile, yet she was touched by his need for her, his sad efforts to succeed.

One day they held a mock wedding with a few friends wishing them well and Daniel overcome within the hour by raki and the island's citron liqueur. Britt drank it too, welcoming the reckless release, yet was drunk too on the wine-like air and her new identity. But beneath lay her loss, suppressed while daily deepening.

As Daniel slept she wove unsteadily through the harbour, singing softly beneath her breath. She reached the causeway. Beneath early autumn cloud, the sea had risen. Now it crashed, with frenzied flecks of white spray flying in the lamplight.

The ragged shore of the Grotta seemed to shift like some sly black beast. She could not see Delos. She heard no lyre. She ran across the causeway and in seconds was soaked.

The Portara rose; no longer omnipotent but desolately derelict. Had Ariadne borne six children? The thought unaccountably possessed her. Then she dwelt on the impotence of Daniel and was aware of a sudden, perverted parallel of present and past that in her intoxication and absorption by the town, seemed feasible.

On the island the links of time were not tenuous. They were formidably forged, distorting reason, elevating dream, bearing in the vortex of the wind, wild layers of illusion. Events, once lived, did not die here, relegated to the arid annals of the past. They rested in the subsoil, in the essence of flesh, blood and bone, unconsciously motivating those moving in their shadow.

Britt acutely feels the force of this as the water breaks over Palatia, as though manipulated by the maenads; their demented, drug-induced derision, buffeting her so she stumbles over crude outcrops of rock on the edge of the island, at the confluence of past, present, the reiterated frailties of the future.

They found Britt's body the next day, dashed against the rocks of the Grotta.

....And some said broken Ariadne drowned herself....

Daniel, his wilful span spent, died from alcohol three weeks later. His few friends enabled the couple to be laid together in the tiny cemetery usually reserved for townspeople.

That was a recognition. And soon their ghosts would rise to perpetuate in the present, the myths of the past.

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Nemesis

Tyche, a daughter of Zeus has the power to decide a mortal's fortune. She is irresponsible in her awards, exemplifying chance. But if someone she has favoured boasts of his wealth and neither sacrifices part of it to the gods nor helps those less fortunate, the goddess Nemesis intervenes and humiliates him.

Zeus falls for Nemesis and chases her over land and sea. She constantly changes shape, yet he violates her at last by turning into a swan. Hence the tale of Leda and the Swan. From the egg she lays, comes Helen, the cause of the Trojan War.

Eddy smiles, laying the cheque on the plastic tablecloth where it seems to glow; the words FOUR MILLION POUNDS pulsating as though alive.

He is a winner in the lottery; the game he sneered at as wishful thinking. He turns the cheque sideways and upside down, drinking in every detail and stroking its creased surface to assure himself it is real.

Nella, with her blind belief in chance, had suggested the numbers. He had smirked but, nonetheless, filled in the form. Then he had forgotten about it. He would have neglected to check the answer, but Nella reminded him. He was speechless as a percentage of the numbers tallied.

He had never been well off; a clerical dogsbody drifting through the days. Now he has no idea how he will spend the money. He will keep it safely in his bank account until he decides.

It does not even occur to him to give a little to Nella. And then there is his ageing and near destitute mother. He remembers the beatings she gave him as a child and decides to keep quiet. This will be his secret cache, to gloat over and perhaps never spend.

He leaves his dingy bedsit as usual every morning, takes the bus through faceless suburbia to the office and returns at night, to bring out the cheque, still unbanked. He lays it lovingly on the table. Its edges are curling but the words remain. FOUR MILLION POUNDS.

The doorbell rings. Nella enters, jaunty in her fake fur and velvet hat worn at a careless angle. She has a nonchalant way of shrugging and throwing wide her hands; taking fate in her stride, yet with an uncanny gift for making suggestions to others that unexpectedly materialise. Her tapering fingers with their long nails that change colour like a painter's experimental palette, might contain a magical means of command.

"Hi! How's my millionaire?" She breezes over to the faded sofa and sinks down with deliberation. Eddy has a fleeting fear of her staying for ever; immovable, expectant, ready to reach with her red nails and lever the cheque from the table.

"I'm fine!" His voice is constrained. "Coffee?"

"Please."

She sips slowly, watching Eddy closely. He is flushed. His eyes keep returning to the cheque.

"When are you going to bank it?" she asks.

He starts. "Er \- soon!"

Does she expect a share? He scrutinises her face; the too-red lips, the purplish eye shadow, the eyes that fix him with ironic amusement. At last she rises from the sofa and placing a hand on his shoulder, as though decreeing his ongoing fate, walks to the door.

"'Bye for now. See you!" She leaves. Eddy sighs, relieved, and returns to finger the cheque that has curled even more under the lamp on the table.

He receives the letter from his mother next day. Coincidental surely. She cannot know about his win. Yet in it, she asks to borrow money - just to the end of the month. Unexpected expenses. Who can have told her? No, it's probably just chance.

He hesitates. She is his mother after all and he has never before been able to help her. Then he remembers her vindictiveness - a repetition of her own treatment as a child. The long hours locked in the cupboard under the stairs and the thrashings with any implement to hand. No, she can fend for herself.

At last he takes the cheque to the bank and with misgivings, allows the cashier to spirit it away. Is he still a millionaire or is this an illusion? Without the cheque lying on the table, can he enjoy his wealth?

He goes to bed, uncertainty delaying sleep. Bank notes float before his eyes and drift as though on an ill-intentioned wind out of reach. He clutches at their corners but his fingers close on air.

Six days later \- panicking - Eddy goes to the bank and withdraws some money. There it lies - crisp notes in his hand. It is tangible and waiting to be spent. Well, it's only a little, he tells himself.

That evening he does not go home. He goes to a bar and has a beer. He does not enjoy it and is jostled by loud people reluctant to take buses and trains. But he stays, until the effect of the beer creates the desire to go elsewhere; to explore this grimy city that so far, has had little to offer that he could afford.

He enters a dubious district and descends steps to a club where women wearing only belts of bright stones revolve on a small stage. One winds herself round a pole.

Eddy has another drink - this time a Scotch which perks him up. Then he is aware of a young woman sitting silently at his table. She has long black hair that hangs limply on her shoulders but her face is vital; her eyes penetrating his with cold calculation.

"Buy me a drink?" she asks.

"Yes, of course," Eddy replies naively. "What's your name?"

"Sissy."

He watches her sip it slowly, never taking her eyes from his flushed face. Her generous mouth smiles but her eyes do not.

Eddy is uneasy but feels obliged to wait until she finishes. He is dizzy, being unused to alcohol and lets the woman take his hot hand in hers. As though caressing a lost animal, she strokes it lightly, until Eddy is reassured and even prepared to stay and buy her another drink.

He feels he has no option when she indicates he should rise and follow her past the still revolving women, upstairs and through a rattling bead curtain.

She guides him to a bed, undresses him and rolls him onto his stomach. His head is rammed to the right and in the dim red light he sees Sissy slip off her dress to reveal black leather underwear and thigh-high boots. From the wall she lifts a long whip and before he can make a move, cracks it on the floor, then sweeps it over his shivering back.

He yelps in pain but when he tries to get up, Sissy raises a booted foot and pushes him back down. She whips him four more times and the blood seeps onto the crumpled sheets.

"That will be fifty pounds!" she announces as Eddy struggles to sit up and pull on his clothes. Smarting, he pays her. He is about to stumble out, when a large man in a sagging suit enters. Eddy cannot know he is Manfred, the woman's employer, or that he has a consuming urge to violate her.

"Help me!" cries the woman, grabbing Eddy as she rushes from the room. He is dragged after her downstairs, past the belted women and into the damp street. Manfred follows.

Stumbling in Sissy's wake, Eddy cannot believe his eyes when he sees her turning from his tormentor in leather underwear, into a crabby old woman wearing rags and carrying a black bin bag. But still Manfred lumbers in pursuit. Eddy looks at him over his shoulder and when he next turns to the woman, she has changed again - this time into a young man, dressed with the casual elegance of an earlier era. But her pursuer is not fooled. He yells abuse at her and attempts to quicken his pace. Eddy still holds the shape-shifting woman's hand.

Then, behind him, he hears the flutter of wings. He turns to see in place of Manfred, a billowing white swan; its great beak opening and closing rapaciously, its small black eye evilly intent on its prey.

The young man has reverted to the woman with the limp black hair and leather underwear already radically out of place in the encroaching dawn. She stops and turns defiantly to face the flapping swan.

"Fight him!" she cries to Eddy, tottering on the edge of the pavement. He looks up at the swan that swings its long neck to and fro in fierce anticipation. Eddy pokes its puffed up breast with an ineffectual finger. The great beak descends and pecks out his hair in tufts.

Eddy backs away, falling over a low garden wall into a damp flower bed. From where he lies, he sees the swan ravage the woman, spreading soiled wings wide across the pavement.

The woman screams and the swan withdraws, its feathers falling, to be replaced by Manfred's sallow skin. He scowls as he sees Sissy, who has scrambled to her feet, running blindly up the street. With a shrug he lumbers off in the other direction.

Cautiously Eddy gets up and shakily climbs back over the wall. He sees Sissy has collapsed under a plane tree on the corner. He reaches her, shivering in her underwear which, inexplicably, she is loosening. She pulls it off and lies down; pallid in the strengthening light. She spreads her skinny legs and to Eddy's alarm, as she pushes and groans, a great golden egg appears. It lies glinting in the pale sun that suddenly shines from the brightening sky.

Nervously, Eddy approaches and reaches a cold hand to touch the egg. It pulsates and begins to glow with the colours of the spectrum. It expands and strains until it cracks and a fair-haired woman - beautiful beyond belief - steps out.

"Hello Eddy. I'm Melissa and I'm immortal. Now it is time for you to draw lots."

She produces six pieces of white paper from the cleavage of her bared breasts. "You were mighty mean with your money, Eddy. Even Nella and your poor old mum lost out. So now it falls to you to decide the future of man - by drawing lots, the world will either go to war, which of course this time will mean curtains, or you and your raddled race will live to see another day."

Shaking, Eddy chooses a piece of folded paper. He opens it. He recalls how he gazed, incredulously, at the words FOUR MILLION POUNDS. Now, numb with disbelief he reads in thick black letters the simple word WAR.

Back to Table of Contents

### ********

Thalassaea

Diemos stands like a figment of fire; created by the scarlet death of day; news of his son's death infiltrating senses numbed in the nebulous approach of night.

Zenos, his only son, has been murdered while on a mission to the mainland. He died, it is claimed, in a drunken brawl. But Diemos envisages Mosta; the underhand leader of the disintegrating mainland. He is provoking a confrontation. Diemos though - a prominent sealord of the twenty third century - is committed to his empire. He has personal power and no need of war.

Let those who can no longer cope, confront each other on the Earth that has been exhausted and polluted to the point of de-population through respiratory disease. Let the survivors live in the technological Underearth or on lonely islands and remote reaches of decontaminated land.

Lamos, the island Diemos found after fleeing the common fate, is slowly rising from the wind-lashed sea; a land of three great mountain ranges; their limestone in the west deceiving the eye; shining as starkly as the highest peaks' perpetual snow.

Lamos is denuded from centuries of exploitation and neglect, yet on its plains and in fields fed by winter rains, glow oranges, lemons and interlaced vines.

Diemos has built a great house of a fabric that floats like air, yet is as strong as steel. Its surface toys with the sun's long rays and breathes with the fast-changing winds; billowing with windows and dancing doors and subsiding with a sigh as night falls, to lie enchanted by the stars.

Diemos listens to the moon's manipulation of the sea, as it swirls and flings white foam like the seed of the gods about his feet. He sees the swelling sun, the flying fantasy of clouds and dimly perceives a code in the secret call of birds.

Do the singing spheres hold keys to an existence gone awry? Man's theories foundered as he succumbed at last, to pure technology; the creation of a wishful world of weightless illusion; software developed to dispel demonic fear.

And within a white cave of Lamos lives Thalassaea. She is sheen and shivering sea muscle; her hair, the washing and weaving of the sea's blackest weed, her quicksilver mind shaping challenges to deceive and destroy.

For Diemos has demanded that each year two young women and two youths be sent to Lamos to meet Thalassaea's challenge. Despite his provocation, Mosta knows he cannot wage war on Diemos. The sealord's resources are too great.

Thalassaea poses two questions; one to the young men, another to the women. They do not know the answers are interchangeable and both will be declared wrong.

Thalassaea glides through a fine mesh of white web strung across the glistening cave. Her dexterous fingers quiver and reach, constantly re-weaving the shimmering strands. From their interlinking issues the essence of audacious fancy; conundrums' are spun from airlessness. Words whirl, waiting to be logically assembled. Enigmas falter from the void.

Thalassaea binds the web to her sea-green forehead, sweeping away the weed-black hair and absorbing the veiled vocabulary.

The quizzical faces of dead philosophers are traced in the lime-white rock. They grope and half grasp universal truths. They gaze at the baffling spheres, are seduced by the sighing songs of an impenetrable cosmos. They pluck perceptions from the wind.

The web words float and form the thoughts of Diogenes of Apollonia.

"What possesses intelligence, governs all and is multi-form?"

"Air," breathes Thalassaea, stepping to the cave's great mouth.

The grave face of Empedocles moves in the half light, wondering at the mysterious machinations of nature, believing himself able to bring about enchantments. He toys with the confrontation of good and evil and looks through the vapour of clouds, perceiving a third, intelligible power.

His words weave through the wavering web: "What cannot be approached by the eyes of men or grasped by their hands?"

"The Divine," whispers Thalassaea. But, equally, the answer could be "Air."

Absorbing the challenge with which she will confront the sacrificial men and women, she spins in anticipation; sea-smooth elusive, moist; her dark hair dissolving into the essence of air. The word web vanishes.

Folding into a white-flecked wave, Thalassaea slides from the cave, slithering through the sun-spilt sand to the petulant sea.

Her body curves into a "sigma", then arches into an "omegha." She is the vessel of the whirling web words; forged with finesse, yet bemusing, deceiving, destroying.

The world waits for the solar eclipse; the moment when the earth is abandoned by the sun - the temperature dropping as the eerie darkness steals and the silent moon shadow sweeps the land.

Astral knowledge has failed to disperse fundamental fear. Will the moon pass on, exposing the sun again to Earth? Or will the mystical hand of fate halt its natural course?

People emerge from underground; tight-lipped, suppressing centuries of guilt. Environmental damage is beyond repair. It would be logical that some retributive power should now emerge, snuffing out survival.

Zariel has been dreaming. She has seen a wild woman swirling like the sea, her laughter rising with the recklessness of wind. To and fro she tosses thoughts, impossible to grasp, like playthings honed, indefinably, for horror. Zariel foresees her own death.

The moon fingers the sun's explosive edge. The lunar shadow moves; swift with malice. People of the past prayed that the beast they believed to be devouring the sun, would die or the struggle of the moon to dominate the sun, would lead to a lunar defeat.

The sunlight turns lilac, unlike twilight but strangely filtered, since, partially, the sun still shines. The diffusion confuses the land's poor plants that begin to close, while still aware of warmth. The small black birds inhabiting the rock-strewn ground, fly home to roost. A wild dog howls as the moon's dark disc consumes the sun.

Zariel stands like a statue with strangers on a darkening hill. She shudders as sudden darkness descends. There is silence, cold; long moments of penetrating limbo. The minutes pass.

Slowly, the light returns; the distant sea glimmers. But, suddenly, the moon halts.

People, heads thrown back and eyes shielded by their hands, gaze in disbelief, willing the moon to move. Some fall to their knees and utter demented prayers; the words whipped into vapour as plants half open and birds shuffle on dim ledges.

Still the moon does not move. A chill persists; unearthly light strains eyes already damaged by the sun.

The wind mocks in fiercely fleeting eddies and Zariel, paralysed with premonition, tries feebly to fend it off, as she stumbles back below ground.

Proof that Zeno had not been killed by Mosta was slow to reach Diemos. But eventually it transpired, through reliable witnesses, that he did indeed die in a drunken brawl.

Twelve young people had been sacrificed in his name. Twelve families mourned and swore vengeance on Diemos. Was this why the moon still veiled the sun?

Diemos reasons; man's accumulated misdemeanours were too numerous for his to be singled out. But his conscience breeds obsession. Each victim, failing Thalassaea's challenge, is trussed and dropped into the heaving bay where krakens have emerged from myth and wait to be fed. Only human flesh silences their bellows resounding like wave-washed thunder.

Kheisha, dark daughter of Diemos, often stands on the wind-worried cliff drenched with the water from the sudden splay of tentacles, whose great suckers shine in the sun. They never quite reach the cliff's crumbling edge, but Kheisha is consumed with pity for those of her own age who have died.

She knows the next victims are on their way. As she stands on the cliff on the second day after the eclipse, the seething white heads of waves rear, sallow in the half light. Ice blows in the wind.

From below comes the muffled moaning of the krakens. They do not usually surface at twilight or dawn, but now hunger is exposing them to the stultified world.

Suddenly, Kheisha sees the white web words of Thalassaea. They have unwound from her sea green head to weave exuberantly from the cave, above the seething krakens. They spell out the challenge with which Thalassaea will confront the mortals.

Diemos lights fires in which Thalassaea throws magical objects to pacify the path of sun and moon. Illogical half human beings rise from her focused mind. They strive to live and assume identity, then, swept by her pervasive will, fold their boneless limbs and let her cast them into the fire.

She utters deep incantations charged with water and wind, glancing askance at the solidified sun. With her fluid fingers she defines the waxing and waning shapes of the moon. But the dim light lingers, the creeping cold possesses her flesh. Her mind grows numb, its riddles unresolved.

Alcmaeon is one of the young men who have drawn lots to face Thalassaea's challenge. He is the son of a former freedom fighter and is genetically unsuited to any other work.

He does not fear the enchantress. His training enables him to reject reason. The warrior is necessarily blinkered and overwhelmed by contrivance; a cause that will liberate, an inviolable duty to defend the status quo. He must relinquish rational foresight and close his mind to the pain he inflicts.

Alcmaeon elevates a personification of vengeance; building in his mind, a pure, muscled god whose single-mindedness consumes his consciousness. He shimmers in the half light, massive against the emasculated sun.

But in his heart, Alcmaeon suspects this god may, at point of death, drift away; a delusion as fragile as a falling flower.

Alcmaeon will be accompanied by Rethno, an uncertain young man who is momentarily relieved at the prospect of release. He is unable to fulfil the savage demands of a shattered society. Yet, as the krakens swim through the enmeshment of his mind, he sinks in anguish on the false floor of the Underearth. He contemplates suicide, but lacks even the courage to take his doomed life. Deeply he drinks a man-made drug that eases the pain of the people's predicament.

Zariel's premonition materialises. She draws one of the women's lots. Her face is pallid within the thick frame of her flame bright hair, her sea green eyes are glazed. The sun has left dancing black spots when it burned her retina. They mass now like mocking demons, anticipating her demise.

She is a computer programmer who has looked deep into the calculating and creative potential of her craft. But she knows that underneath the skill and slick substitution for real life, reality has stealthily advanced. It might have liaised with mystic forces volubly decried by contemporary man, to halt the automation of the heavens.

Lysysta draws the final lot. Daughter of a textile merchant, she has learned to calculate and measure life as astutely as her father's fabric. Yet she knows her calculations bear no relation to an unpredictable reality. So her fear of the forthcoming challenge is shot with spasms of terror.

Two nights before the victims are due to leave, they have the simultaneous sensation that the Earth has been condemned because their compatriots are dying through Diemos's delusions. Until now, only he has been burdened with this conviction.

The unalleviated gloom has altered people's eyesight. They see phantoms and wraiths born of moonlight and sun; the familiar is distorted with dream-like menace.

The day of the sailing dawns; swathed in the eerie light of partial eclipse. The water broods as though bottomless and rife with mutation. The four young people sit in silence. Only Alcmaeon's mind moves with alacrity through the implications of their predicament. He is possessed by premonitions born of mist and a malignant feline force.

Lamos looms; white-clad mountains pierce the sullen sky; oranges that have ripened on steep slopes glow like displaced suns, suspended in gloom.

Diemos waits in the harbour. His resilience is dwarfed by the glowering sky and the white-crested waves that wash at his feet in disdain.

His henchmen usher the young people onto a broad blue way that sways like fallen sky beneath their feet, as they walk to his great house.

Within its undulating walls, they are led, disorientated, down dancing steps to a room that might be a bottomless black bowl swung by the hand of a capricious household god.

Alcmaeon turns to see the woman in their wake. Kheisha. Black hair scattered with hand-crafted stars; mirroring the indissoluble night.

He is motionless; frozen by her unearthly face. Her eyes vacillate between revelation and concealment. She has a mythical dimension.

Alcmaeon slips from the room and joins her in a chamber that floods with the essence of water and sky. It slides in cool waves across her dark face. She is a rootless chameleon, illusively laughing, then solemn.

"I will tell you how to meet Thalassaea's challenge," she whispers. And repeats the definitions of Air and the Divine.

An illusion of waves washes against them and as though bound within a salt wet web, the room heaves a ponderous sigh.

Thalassaea has been violated. She senses the mortal woman's treachery. She feels her enigmas sucked through the sea air to the undulating house.

She lengthens like a moon-shot wave and slips into the water. She follows the foul smell of krakens which laces the lazy salt sea, until she sees their tangled tentacles and lustful yet unfocused eyes. Sand slides in rivulets between their massive teeth.

Weaving like a wraith between their tentacles, Thalassaea extracts their basest instincts; stirring, with magical manipulation, their hatred of humanity.

They cannot recall the origin of their bitterness; some injustice too monstrous to remember lies beneath their desire for man's death. They writhe in the gloom; baffled by the half light of the sun, susceptible to mirage in the waves, liable to lunge at shadows.

Thalassaea has told them a ship will pass; its multi-layered sails throwing colour across the water.

In the house Lysysta sits hunched; knees swathed in twisted strands of hair. Her timid soul shudders, shadow-haunted. Rethno watches her fear; identifying, and finally reaching out to touch her arm.

She looks up, her wide eyes charged with the gratefulness of a maltreated child.

Zariel succumbs to the power of premonition. She sees again the wild woman - no longer laughing, but flashing in a frenzy to where the lusting krakens dive, creating whirlpools of deep water.

Zariel freezes. She is unaware of the undulating room, Alcmaeon's disappearance, the fear of her fellow captives. Before her eyes the sun spots expand and dance demonically. They extinguish her insights and mock her effort to extract reason from irrationality.

Alcmaeon returns. Surreptitiously, he approaches the captives and to each reveals the answers to Thalassaea's challenge.

"You will live and she will die!" he assures them.

The sun glowers, eager to dislodge the moon. But the moon, replete with the mysticism of ancient matriarchies and intent on restoring intuition, remains; waiting for acknowledgment from an arrogant age.

Diemos strides into the room, which rocks now as though in anticipation of Thalassaea's challenge. The young people stand in line, the answers to her queries lodged in the terrified tissue of their minds. Alcmaeon is implacable. Kheisha accompanies her father. She too is expressionless.

All pass from the breathing house into the dim day and through the oranges, lemons and straggling vines, which, lacking full sun, are languishing.

They see the shore from a windswept headland where oleander runs vividly through gullies to the sea. The foam thrusts in the twilight like lace-limbed beings in constant metamorphosis; their writhing bestial and bewildered.

From their chaos, Thalassaea rises; her sea-soaked limbs growing in the gloom; shot with shimmering weed and sliding silver fish. Fury contorts her green grey face. Vestiges of web whirl on the water.

She is suddenly on shore. And as the mortals descend the rock-strewn path, she beckons with a finger that quivers with fine fins. Diemos and Kheisha stand aloof as the men and women lift slow feet through the sand.

Obscenely, the mouth of her cave gapes at the base of a broken cliff. It seems the symbol of insatiability. The captives enter, aware of distant and indefinable echoes. Remnants of the white web flutter like the scant remains of ghosts.

Thalassaea follows. Her dripping form contracts to writhe through the entrance of the cave. She smells of the seething sea and wasted weed.

Confronting the men and women, she suddenly laughs; waves of cruel derision drowning the vague sea echoes. Her voice is redolent with storm-whipped water.

"What possesses intelligence, governs all and is multi-form?" The words flow and suck like the incoming tide.

"Air," breathe the captives in unison.

Thalassaea sneers.

"What cannot be approached by the eyes of men or grasped by their hands?"

"The Divine." The voices are confident and without pause, add, "But equally the answer could be Air."

Thalassaea gathers her great body, glistening now with multiplying scales. Her head washes wildly against the cave's roof. She emits a paralysing cry; distressed, astonished, enraged.

Her eyes close, her nose and mouth run in rivulets of foam. Her head collapses and streams into her salt-encrusted body. Within seconds, this cascades in crystals; green, blue, amethyst and white. Briefly, they strive to form letters and words - to devise another challenge. But they disintegrate into particles whose colour swiftly fades. They have become mere grains of sand.

Diemos and Kheisha creep towards the cave's mouth. Apprehensively they peer inside. The men and women are gazing in awe at the scattered sand.

"WHERE IS SHE?" Diemos roars. His voice is thrown back by the cave's incalculable depths.

Frantically, Kheisha gestures to Alcmaeon. He musters the captives and, thrusting Diemos aside, they rush from the cave.

A small boat with multi-coloured sails lies on the wave-lashed sand. Fingers of white water probe its base, yet it remains motionless, as though spellbound. Alcmaeon grasps Kheisha and carries her aboard. The others follow, clutching the boat's phantom bow, that dissolves like air beneath their hands.

Without warning the boat slips into the sea. It skims the waves as though borne by a benevolent hand.

Kheisha clings to Alcmaeon. The partial sun casts curious distortions on the water, until the voyagers can no longer differentiate between reality and illusion.

Kheisha can already hear the krakens. Others may believe their anguished cry to be the whining of the wind.

Zariel too registers recognition. In her mind, she sees the tangled tentacles weave and plunge, aware of human flesh. And, looking at Kheisha, she knows that the daughter of Diemos shares her insight.

Rethno tries to grasp the ethereal side of the gliding boat, his fingers fluttering in thin air. Lysysta clutches his arm.

Alcmaeon drifts into a well of half perception. He is possessed by a claustrophobic presence; the threat of some insuperable malevolence should he take Kheisha away.

As though aware of his will, the boat turns towards the shore. It beaches silently on sand that glimmers with particles of gold.

The others sleep as though bewitched. Alcmaeon takes Kheisha's cold hand and helps her from the boat. She recoils. He walks resolutely, urging her over the alien sand. He feels the malevolence grow. Kheisha slows.

"What is it?" she asks.

Alcmaeon is silent. He thrusts Keisha towards an ugly overhang of rock. She strikes her head and falls unconscious in the sand. Alcmaeon returns to the boat and turns her prow homewards.

Kheisha wakes to a waste of sea lapping the brooding beach. The sullen sunlight forges water-borne fantasies that undulate and constantly dissolve. A deep-throated call echoes from the waves, followed by a long, embittered howl.

The water is forcefully parted. The leathery head of a kraken leers. More surface, flinging tentacles to the blackened sun; a mass of indefinable demands.

Unsteadily Kheisha stands. She walks slowly through the sand into the white-webbed sea. The krakens rear, smelling her woman's odour on the wind. But they sense she is their means to some more satisfying end and let her swim within the restless lacework of their arms.

Kheisha strikes out strongly in the wake of Alcmaeon's boat. The krakens follow, their tentacles trailing long lines of foam through the sea. Now they are silent, save for the slow displacement of the water. They anticipate and prepare to encircle their prey.

The people on the boat drift in and out of sleep; their heads awash with images beyond the grasp of man. They are sapped of will and cannot rise when Alcmaeon cries out, seeing the krakens' advance.

He watches, horrified, as the beasts near. He smells their foul breath and hears a hissing in their sagging throats. The sea surges, thrusting the crests of milling waves into the boat. It tips, rights, and tips again. Its spellbound occupants spill into the sea.

The krakens tear the flesh of Zariel, Rethno and Lysysta from their bones, which they leave to be tossed - stark flotsam from an ailing world \- on the wayward water. Alcmaeon dives and - dodging the thrashing tentacles - swims with the aid of some alien power, towards the shore. The krakens plunge and vanish; leaving in their wake a harmless swirl of salt.

Kheisha leaves the sea and lying on the beach, feels water wash through her weary limbs; the fluid essence that was once Thalassaea seeking resurrection in her flesh. She retains the mind of Diemos's daughter, yet, bodily, succumbs to salt-soaked metamorphosis. Nature, exploited by man, who was drawn to ancient sacrifice and the modern micro-chip, resolves to draw him through her mysteries and force him to recognise responsibility.

As Kheisha wanders through the land of long eclipse, she feels enigmas moving through her mind. She has inherited the whirling words that haunted Thalassaea. They curve, combine, dissemble and tease; from alpha to omegha, posing restless riddles.

They ask why man has rejected nature and raised the wrath of the krakens. They weave wild, uncomprehending words, demanding clarification of man's will to sacrifice, to allow Thalassaea - a frightening figment of the mind spun from sea salt - to challenge men and women long divorced from the earth. They ask if there is no end to man's ability to inflict suffering and complication on himself and the land that once sustained him.

As she reaches the summit of a limestone slope, violet in the modicum of sun, she sees people who were living in the Underearth, unsteadily emerge. Blinded, they hold hands across their eyes, then slowly lift them to look at the world from which they had fled.

Some primeval force has coaxed them into the day. Seeing the half eclipse they fall in awe to their knees, uttering incantations and snatching at the earth. The soil slips through their fingers. Their voices are borne seawards on the wind. They see Kheisha - a land-locked creature from the sea. Around her swirl enigmas comprised of smoke-like air.

Light falls suddenly on the dormant earth. The moon is moving; shifting with slow deliberation across the face of the sun. In seconds, the sun is revealed. The stalled eclipse - urging reassessment from the people - has passed.

The stunted populace is blinded. Hands are raised to startled eyes. Some people fall to their knees in fear. Others gaze, astounded, at the shimmering earth.

Kheisha perceives an implosion; a great collapse, like the ancient fall of Knossos. The world's technology has gone. Computerisation, that alienated man from nature, is shattered by a deeper and more demanding force.

Kheisha walks to the shore and sees the whirling water where the krakens - avenging elements from the polluted depths - had strained. A mist drifts. Slowly, a boat appears, its timbers wraith-like, and within, the ghosts of those who had died, cling, unable to disperse.

Kheisha thinks she sees Alcmaeon at the prow, but the mist thickens and obliterates the boat.

The sun-spilt world turns faster. From Kheisha's breath, as she dances in the sudden growth of green, the words still flow. They weave around the wandering people, seeking refuge now above their cavernous homes and picking fresh fruit that burgeons on the fertile ground and in the tangled trees.

Alcmaeon rises from the water. His flesh is familiar. Yet he is steeped in guilt, remembering his assault on Keisha. She moves painfully though his mind, supplanting Thalassaea, carried on a wave of enigmatic words to a place of rock-bound awe.

He is lifted and borne on thermals induced by gods of a re-awakened sky, to a coast of gleaming green inlets. Then he is pulled by heavy hands into great caves; forged with a fantasy whose ingenuity overwhelms. Beings from a realm beyond reason, jostle and tower; trapped for eternity through the action of water on rock. Frozen fingers are mirrored - trembling in the depths from which they rise. Columns crane like the crazed aberrations of a dark demon forced to relinquish the light and build an impenetrable world under water.

Colours dance; blue, red, ochre and brown, for a mysterious light moves before Alcmaeon who rides in a shell-like boat. The water speaks. Echoes. And he knows that, through the labyrinth of water words, Kheisha is also moving.

They are being plunged into the essence of a nature that is distorted and gross; as bizarre as the world contrived by people who could no longer live on earth. And Alcmaeon knows they have been chosen by a random god to avenge the shattered earth.

Slowly, he gains on Kheisha. Now he can see her shadow in a faint light falling on the water. She too rides in a shell-shaped boat. Alcmaeon can hear her weeping. Water words rise between them and form enigmatic phrases; probing the meaning of existence. They undulate through vents into the green land above and people, awe-struck, move towards them, eager to discover their meaning.

The grieving gods of nature will forgive them and let them feel their way towards the essence of the earth. Their god of glib technology is dead. They have only those elements within and without themselves on which to draw.

The ghosts of those who died, despite rightly responding to Thalassaea's challenge, materialise through mist-swept waves lapping the regenerated land. Silently, they raise transparent arms; Zariel still perceiving fragments of the future through veils of premature death. Rethno trembles and is draw with a howl, below the water. Lysysta spins briefly in terror.

And Diemos, who has wandered in a daze from Lamos, looks too long at the shimmering sun and, blinded, dies, yielding instant ashes to the earth.

As the new land sings, Alcmaeon and Kheisha must also relinquish life for infinite limbo. They played too prominent a part in the sacrificial past and are now unable to leave the echoing caves. Having gained on Kheisha, Alcmaeon can draw no nearer. He cannot stop her weeping. She knows he is behind her but is unable to slow and turn to him. Water slaps rock, the faint light glimmers and, as the boats drift on, the forms of gross distortion shift and shuffle minute rock grains in the gloom.

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The Memory of Myth

They entered the wormhole on the second day of the fourth month of a year that irretrievably vanished. The craft sang a swift and desperate song; sucking and expelling interstellar air, then rapidly rolling out of control.

Ishalla kept her head as sensations whirled and whined. She held the craft for several seconds, then succumbed to the forces of fate and unbridled time.

Her four colleagues - two men and two women - trained for every challenge in space except entering this unknown element - lost consciousness. As though she alone had been spared for some unprecedented encounter, Ishalla retained reason and a crystalline perception of the present, although she knew she was being toyed with by the terrifying essence of time.

Beside her lay the rocks from the lonely moons she had explored; a mixture of magic and geology; obdurate and dull or shining with veins of verve and possibility. All held incalculable secrets. As the craft began to spin, they appeared to breathe as though conniving in its wild progression.

Ishalla checked the monitor. Darkness swirled like a disintegrating black beast, then reassembled, intensifying and beginning to assume coherence, before once more falling apart as though pulled by unseen hands.

Time was tossed and redefined. Ishalla thought she heard the wind infiltrate the craft and rapidly checked for a breach of insulation. All was in tact. Yet she felt sure some outer element had found a way to enter with intermittent gasps. A cold breath brushed her face.

The outer darkness flashed with strands of purple, green and blue; a leaping lightshow where individual tones were atmospherically tossed and mixed, then slowly formed a clearly visible vortex.

Ishalla felt the craft cajoled into the narrowing tunnel; drawn lightly yet decisively down to its pulsating core.

Was she entering the universe rumoured to lie beyond a wormhole? Were there more than one? Would she hurtle on into infinity?

The colours wove and parted. Countless stars like silver shards, danced against the black. They formed circles, like sparkling necklets for the gods or curved; the letters of a celestial alphabet. Some shone in isolation; untouchable solitaires. Others shimmered with geometrical precision, creating unprecedented formulae.

From within their mesmerising mass, a disc; grey against the black expanse of sky, appeared on the monitor. It oscillated, as though enticing the craft into its orbit; teasingly drawing away into the stars, then moving closer at high speed.

Ishalla tried again to manipulate the craft, but it remained under the wormhole's influence; shooting smoothly now through the showers of stars and the diminishing shades of purple, green and blue.

The disc gained coherence. It was a planet with peaks reflecting the cosmic lightshow and valleys steeped in shadow. Great plains spread like hands whose fingers were the dancing lengths of light, constantly shifting, to vanish, then reappear in woven variation.

The craft descended. Ishalla felt a reduction in speed as her hands impotently tried to manoeuvre it down. The black earth rushed towards her. The interwoven colours vanished. She could no longer decipher where the edge of sky ended and the land began.

She did not feel the landing. She was merely aware that the sensation of wind within the craft had ceased. Silence. She turned to her colleagues. They did not stir. Their faces were ashen. She unstrapped; felt their pulses. They were dead.

She froze with the weight of unalleviable isolation. Then, placing moon rocks in a portable container, she moved cautiously to the exit, which glided open of its own accord. The wind she had sensed now blew softly in her face. It had the seduction of the south. She felt it tentatively explore her like a lover. She was unafraid as she stepped from the craft.

Her feet sank into dark dust that on being disturbed, disintegrated in glittering fragments. Faint signs of the purple, green and blue light fell on a nearby slope. Ishalla climbed it with difficulty, the dust dragging at her feet. But on the summit she drew a sharp breath. Below lay a pulsating mass of elegant architecture; insights of symmetry, with spaces, curves, steps and slowly turning domes, spanning wide waterways.

On nearing the city, she saw no one. The buildings shone with a delicate sheen and, looking up to seek the light source, she saw the planet's distant moon, as cold as Earth's but whose deep canyons and soaring cliffs were more lucidly defined. The moon's pale light fell on the city, turning walls and revolving domes into fickle ghosts.

Ishalla felt the substance of a wall. It had the disconcerting texture of web woven by some miraculous arachnid. There were no windows. No sound. Even the wind had died. The city might be holding its breath.

She crossed a moonspilt waterway, flowing with enigmatic abstractions. On the other side, a road that seemed to be made of compounded dust from the outer plain, stretched between the windowless, web-like walls.

Then she saw an entrance. It was built beneath a silently revolving dome and framed by the movement of coloured light that had lit the plain. There was no door - merely an opening into a way of gloom, vibrating softly beneath the dome.

Ishalla walked as though in limbo. Then, at the end she saw a well of light. She entered a vast room; a laboratory of the twenty third century; as methodically conceived as any on Earth. It might have been borne through time and space. But it was empty. Had its technicians vanished in the vortex?

Ishalla saw a complex microscope. Tentatively she touched it and felt an instant response. She lifted the moonrocks from their container and laid them on the gleaming work surface.

They were the essence of Rhea, a moon of Saturn, Io and Callisto, moons of Jupiter, and of Charon, orbiting distant Pluto. Now they lay inert, dazzled by the light. But within lay the secrets of a universe to which it would be impossible to return.

Ishalla placed the rock from Rhea under the microscope. Carefully she dissected it and looked hard at its substance. Clearly she perceived microbial life; unmoving yet distinctively worm-like. How long had it been sealed in the rock?

She knew micro-organisms could live in perma frost or water. They had first been found in a Martian meteorite two centuries ago. And, on Earth, they had been retrieved from two miles down in the solid rock of old lava flows. They lived in hydrogen gas when water reacted with volcanic rock.

Ishalla recalled how they could be re-animated by warmth, even after being frozen for millions of years. And moss which was forty thousand years old, had been revived in laboratories on Earth.

Ishalla took the rock to the incubation area. She repeated her examination with the rocks from Charon, Io and Callisto. All contained clear evidence of microbial life. All were placed in the warmth.

Ishalla examined the laboratory minutely. She had entered the wormhole in the twenty third century. But was this laboratory an isolated aspect of that era? Did the city exist in a different dimension of time? She had a sudden insight into the city. It was timeless; mysteriously created from moondust and air, as the setting for the resolution of some crisis. Only when that was resolved would the future be feasible.

As she sat outside the laboratory, the soft wind rose again; a playful whisper in the dark that had intensified while she worked. She felt no ill effects from this planet's atmosphere. Did it even exist? Or had she rejected the reality of flesh to be mastered by an over-stretched mind?

But as she gazed at the nameless moon, she knew she had entered another dimension and had brought with her the chaos and speculation of her species. And she knew that within the rocks, gleaned from moons within the old universe, lay some reference to the past and a key that, after complications, would disclose the future.

She pondered on the expanding universe. She had flown through the hundred billion stars of the Milky Way. She had seen the golden globe of Saturn with its lustrous rings and etching of lace-like lines. She had studied the ice of which they were made; swirling snowflakes, hurtling balls, daunting drifts.

She had gazed at this planet, light enough to float on water yet named after Cronus, a Titan who swallowed his children in case they ousted him from power. He failed to stop Rhea hiding Zeus, who later murdered him. In the sky, the planet Jupiter - the Roman form of Zeus - appropriately catches up with Saturn every twenty years.

She had observed Saturn's hurricane-force winds - the fastest in the Solar System, the flaring white spots, the mass of hydrogen and helium.

In 1612 Galileo lost sight of Saturn's two moons. Had he eaten his children? But four years later they returned, shaped as two half ellipses.

Ishalla - darkly discerning, disciplined and drawing now on her long training as an astronaut - looked into the moon's impassive face. Its silence and the breath of soft wind belied the reverberating effect of life's birth twelve billion years ago; the cataclysmic change that filled a void with space, time and energy; an element smaller than an atom generating infinity.

She tautened - wiry and compact - contemplating the contest of matter and anti-matter; the ultimate triumph of matter and a surge of energy spawning radiation. There had been televisions on Earth caught in a time warp - marred by interference that was radiation from the creation. She envisaged the first stars being born from hydrogen and helium and how hydrogen atoms from that time were still present in water drunk billions of years later on Earth.

Were the scientists right? Was that how it happened? Numerous theories had emerged since the twenty first century, yet the Big Bang was still believed in by many. No one now claimed that creation had been the brainchild of an intangible god.

The buildings where he had been worshipped had been abandoned and crumbled or been converted into homes for the milling populace.

When man had polluted and depleted Earth, nature gods had risen from the seas, the melting Poles and foul landmass. Migrations to controlled environments on Mars and the Moon had been man's means of survival.

On the way to the moon Io, Ishalla had passed Jupiter, the largest planet in the Solar System. She recalled its enormity - as wide as eleven Earths and lived again the precarious journey among its sixteen moons.

Was Jupiter a failed star - a "brown dwarf"? Its constant yellow light shone as she passed, laced with light and dark bands reflecting weather changes. Then the Great Red Spot appeared; an imposing ball of phosphorus that eddied and provoked. She flew through the planet's highest clouds - blindingly white ammonia frozen into ice crystals. Below she knew lay a mass of hydrogen and helium, until they became liquid metal, shining like an unnavigable silver lake above a core of rock.

Her first sight of Pluto - named after Hades, god of the Underworld - had been unnerving; she was entering unbounded isolation. A planet of low mass and weak gravity, she viewed it with the air of an alien as she headed for Charon, its moon, which seemed to hang motionless in a vast vault of sky.

The moons had been chosen for research as the revival of an ancient obsession with Earth's Moon emerged among the remnants of man still inhabiting the ravaged planet.

Science had failed them and as they gazed at the galaxy through which so many of their species had fled, they were drawn, with memories of mythological magic, to the newly colonised Moon. They wanted their worship to prevent her devastation.

Ishalla looked up, seeking familiar entities, then remembered she was in another universe. The stars she watched were not those of the Milky Way. They belonged to another galaxy which had already no doubt moved billions of miles from Earth's universe which was expanding at a million miles an hour.

It was thought particles of dark matter would prevent the galaxies falling apart. But was there enough dark matter? Was there too little gravity? Was Earth's universe even now becoming a soup of atoms and dark matter \- a slow death in infinity?

Ishalla looked for an exploding star - a spa nova at the end of its life. These were how man worked out whether other galaxies were near or far and how fast the universe was expanding. A fate determined in the first seconds of creation.

And was there a Sun in this new universe? She would not know until the sky lightened. Or was the planet steeped in constant dusk and darkness?

She knew Earth's Sun would shine for almost another five billion years and by then most stars in that universe would be dead and would fall into a Black Hole. In one hundred billion years darkness would descend about the last dying stars. Gravity would vanish.

Ishalla sleeps and is woken by a strengthening wind. The sky is lighter yet the stars still visible. She can see no sun, but within her insulated clothing, feels warm. Where are hunger and thirst? Again, she wonders if she is living in a dream and will wake to find she and her colleagues, having undergone some inexplicable lapse, are speeding back to Earth.

But the web-like buildings are familiar. The great domes silently revolve - how, she wonders, with no human or alien hand? And the deep waterways are shot with reflective riddles whose origin is obscure.

She returns to the laboratory. The great room is still brightly lit - a capsule in her own dimension. She checks the incubation area, anticipating a long wait for results. But she cannot resist removing the rocks and taking them to the microscope.

She studies the section from Rhea. To her astonishment, the worm-like microbes are moving; converging and conniving as though seeking identity.

They squirm and interlock. Gradually, they take a semi-human shape; a minute head with hints of black hair, the vague shape of limbs; flickering and elusive. A woman who seems an illusory compilation of unearthly atoms.

Ishalla withdraws, astounded, wondering once more if she is steeped in dream. When she looks again, the woman seems clearer and is reaching from the rock.

Removing the microscope, Ishalla sees she is now large enough to touch. She extends her little finger to the woman's tiny hand. She feels thin air and again, the woman wavers. But her wispy image steps from the rock. In her other hand, a bronze drum slowly takes shape. She stands now on the shining work surface.

Steadily the woman grows. She becomes half Ishalla's height. Still she flickers; more air than flesh, but her stature increases and, as Ishalla steps back, she glides from the work surface as though some mercurial mechanism has replaced musculature.

She smiles, beckons and begins to slide across the floor of the laboratory. Ishalla follows. They leave the room by another exit and enter a sloping way with crystalline walls and a floor with the quality of air, yet the strength to bear the human woman's weight.

Ishalla yearns to identify the woman, yet is sealed in pervasive silence. Suddenly a scream rings through the narrow way. The white walls shake.

The women reach the entrance to a cave-like room steeped in gloom. The wind that had caressed Ishalla now roars, pushing past her like a tangible presence. Ishalla looks into the room to see a silver egg shining in the centre of the floor. Above it crouches a black figure, expanding and contracting in agitation. The floating woman from the moon rock kneels in reverence. "Liriam!" she utters.

Night, thinks Ishalla. This being is Night. Her darkness prevents light entering the room yet the silver egg throws rapid reflections at the slate-like walls.

The egg cracks. Liriam gasps. The gleaming shell shatters and out steps a hermaphrodite with four fine heads. It shakes out a pair of golden wings. It hisses, bleats and roars.

Liriam touches its pale skin, running long fingers the length of its abdomen and tracing the contours of its faces.

"Tyraeus. I will call you Tyraeus," she says.

Then she turns to the flickering woman.

"Trulith, at last. I have been waiting. Who is this?" Liriam indicates Ishalla. Still she cannot speak.

"She has given me life. I was sealed in the rocks of Rhea," says Trulith. Momentarily, on mentioning the moon's name, a shadow clouds her face. A memory might have moved there, then vanished. She sits at the entrance of the room and begins to play her drum.

Liriam stands. Ishalla sees now she is a handsome woman, yet, like the beings from the moon rock, not quite flesh. Her features shift on the point of transience.

Tyraeus folds his golden wings and lightly kisses Liriam's hand. He is entirely self-possessed and fully formed; his four heads not freakish, but each face individually absorbing and assessing.

Ishalla is not afraid, but stands in awe and as the being's blue eyes stare into hers, wishes to sensually succumb. Instead, she turns, and washed with wonder and anticipation, hurries back along the crystalline way to the laboratory.

She places the rock from Io under the microscope. She remembers the moon Io, blazing with fires raised by Jupiter's gravity. In mythology Io, daughter of the river god Inachus, had been seduced by Zeus. In the vastness of the sky, Io was distorted by Jupiter into an egg shape, like a psychologically manipulated woman, unable to leave the orbit of her lover. Ishalla recalls the great geysers erupting in enormous plumes - the molten rock heating up hidden pockets of sulphur.

The microbes within the rock are motionless. Disappointed, Ishalla returns it to incubation.

Another night falls; the transition from dusk to dark almost imperceptible. Again Ishalla goes outside, the need to come to terms with events overriding her desire to return to the room of the extraordinary birth.

She holds her head, imagining it will clear and reality return. But only the wind, gentle once more, seems to weave within her flesh. The buildings remain silently insubstantial, the moon deliberately defined, yet as alien as the enchanted day's developments.

The next day Ishalla returns to the laboratory and looks long at the strangely shaped rock from Io. She thinks it shifts slightly. She takes it from the incubator and places it beneath the microscope. Its fire-pocked surface begins to glow. Minute flames lick the blackness and very slowly, one persistent flame flickers into the form of another woman. Or is she a mere figment of fire? Her hair glows to reveal a living face; fine-featured and folded in pain.

Like the woman from Rhea, she begins to grow; uncertain and elemental, but on trying to step from the rock, is caught fast by her hair. She cries in a tiny voice.

Tentatively, Ishalla reaches down and gently tugs her trapped hair. It burns her fingers, but falls free of the rock. The tiny woman, like a fire-spawned homunculus, lifts eyes as black as burnt coals and looks at the astronaut, crouched over her like a great goddess who has given her life.

Ishalla steps back as the woman gains height. She emanates heat. Her limbs glow, then gutter like flames about to die.

She slips onto the floor, her eyes on the entrance to the way that leads to the inexplicable and bewitched. Ishalla follows at a distance. Soon Trulith's drum echoes with a dull, consistent beat.

The woman of fire enters the room. Ishalla remains at the entrance where Trulith fixes her with alien eyes.

In the centre of the room, Liriam sits, wrapped in black and transfixed by Tyraeus, who has spread his golden wings and is slowly wafting them to create a foul breeze in the subterranean room.

When the glimmering woman enters, his four heads swing to scrutinise her; the blue eyes absorbing her fire-flecked limbs, that might be toying with existence.

Initially she shrinks, fearful of his blinding beauty, then, drawn by his aura, steps forward.

"Who are you?" Tyraeus asks. His voice is low.

"Anula."

Ishalla thinks, "No, you're not. You are Io; a woman re-emerging from mythology. You were seduced by Zeus."

Liriam rises as the couple stand in sensual confrontation. She brushes past Trulith and gestures to Ishalla to follow. They return to the laboratory and pass outside, into a dim, still day.

"What is this place?" asks Ishalla.

"A dying land where time has gone awry and emotions can no longer be contained. We have been tortured by dreams of gods and shapeshifters, of reality riddled with mythology - ancient symbols imposing on technology, inducing us to commit follies and foul acts. We are about to become extinct."

This is familiar; a reflection of Earth, thinks Ishalla. "Where is everyone?" she asks.

"Living on the far side of the city. Waiting."

"For extinction?"

"Yes."

"What's the name of this place?"

"We cannot remember and we don't know where we came from. I have tried to lead and inspire because I feel detached, as though I might serve some sort of purpose, but I can't compete with despair."

Ishalla looks hard at Liriam. As darkness falls she perceives black wings expanding softly from behind the woman's shoulders.

She had studied Greek mythology before turning to a technical career. And she sees in Liriam the personification of Night, courted by the Wind. The silver egg, symbolising the moon, had been laid in darkness and Eros had emerged; the weird epitome of love.

Night had named him Ericepaius - feeder upon heather. Some called him Phanes; a loudly buzzing celestial bee and son of the goddess Aphrodite. The beehive was studied as an ideal republic and confirmed the myth of the Golden Age when honey dripped from trees.

"Have you heard of the Golden Age?" Ishalla asks Liriam.

Her face brightens. As Ishalla recalls the age of gold, Liriam remembers the dream that, in bliss one night, had borne this era to her.

"Cronus was created to express the natural world. Men had no need to work, but lived on the land. They ate wild fruit and honey that dripped from trees," says Ishalla. "They were content and never grew old. They were the expression of an unattainable longing, but some say their spirits remain in the givers of good fortune and upholders of justice."

"Ah, how to combine the carefree with the discipline needed for survival?" says Liriam, "I thought I had the answer - we have advanced technology and the opportunity for leisure. But our people are perverse. Pleasures were not creatively channelled and led to pain and then the dreams began. Now they fear sleep. They sit in the last limbo of a pointless life that I feel is soon to end."

"Why have I come here?" asks Ishalla. "I was taking moon rocks back to Earth - that's my home. That too has been destroyed by its inhabitants. Incidentally, how did you know Trulith would come? Does she not remind you of Rhea who guarded the cave of Night?"

"I had a premonition. Her name was clear. Her purpose less so. But this is a symptom of how time has doubled back, spun forward, become inverted and unpredictable. Are we mere shades of what went before or meaningful purveyors in the present of incidents enacted in the past?

"I have a confession. I gave birth to Tyraeus yet I do not love him like a mother, but like a lover. Now what do I do about that?"

He is Eros, thinks Ishalla. He is destined to be irresistible. She looks at the crouched black figure whose limbs merge with the night and whose face is as pallid as the moon.

She says, "I suspect the myths may take strange turns. As you say, the past has been drawn into the present and may be unpredictably resolved in the future."

Liriam rises; an integral aspect of the night and, with foreboding, Ishalla follows. They pass the silent webs of abandoned buildings. Some sigh, as though steeped in sadness, a low sound that mingles moodily with the wind.

Gradually, the buildings thin, the deceptive waterways lose their lustre and a desolation drifts through the night.

The sky is clear; pitted with stars and lit by the decisive moon. Its white light falls on the dark dust. Particles shimmer and dance.

The first people appear; moonstruck ghosts - half human, yet, like Liriam, charged with ethereality. They sit in a hollow, woven with wire-like vegetation. Their heads are bowed, their bodies slumped and scantily clad.

One man lifts strange eyes brimming with bad dreams. A woman looks up, steeped in confusion. Time, illusion and reality have congealed in an insoluable conundrum. Some people moan, as though under the spell of a time-travelling demon extricating remnants of sanity.

"I can do nothing," says Liriam, "They no longer hear me."

The women return to the laboratory.

Trulith sits at the enchanted room's entrance. Her drum, intended to warn Liriam of a stranger's approach, lies heavily in her hands. She watches Liriam drift restlessly in the dark. Trulith is obsessed by her; the way she moves with a sinuous self possession; the gentle spreading and retraction of her wings, her ability to darkly shine, then blend into blackness, as though she is being retrieved by the night.

She longs to touch her blackness, to reach below the brooding surface and feel a mysterious mix of flesh and dark magic. She wants Liriam to touch her in return, to rouse and relish her, to declare a sensual dependence.

But Liriam barely acknowledges her existence. She is obsessed with Tyraeus. As his mother, she feels free to caress him, but he perceives the sexual implications of her hands. He scorns and teases her, allowing her proximity, then withdrawing with the disdainful hiss of a serpent.

He watches Anula, possessed by inner fire, moving in the shadows with unattainable grace and embryonic fervour. One night he reaches his elegant arms to her, brushes her features with his five strange faces and gathers her into his golden wings. She yields; the fire flowing through her vestigial limbs; the essence of woman possessed.

That night Anula dreams. She is Io, borne through water, her hand held by her father, Inachus, the river god. She passes by willow and alder and gently copulating birds; white-feathered, red-billed. On the river wind drifts the scent of an unearthly being; feminine yet fleshless.

Iynx, the nymph-like daughter of Echo and Pan stalks the great god Zeus as he reclines, off guard, in the guise of a random nature god.

Anula sees the nymph - invisible - blow blossoms bearing the elements of lust, into his ear. She tries to hide among the waving reeds. Her father's hand has slipped, releasing her into a whirling vortex of water. Trapped, she sees Zeus wade into the river, his great hands reaching for her floating hair. He grasps it and winds it round his arm, reeling her in, out of the vortex, up against his massive chest. She cannot move. His hand closes her petulant mouth. He penetrates her with the ease and portentousness of a god.

Suddenly he stops and she drops. She hears the shrill objection of Hera, Zeus's consort, ringing through the vast vault of the sky.

Zeus grasps her and pulling her to the bank, bends her head to the grass. She feels it elongate; eyes and nostrils turning to those of a cow, comprised of instinct and the constant need to pull at grass. She feels the weight of udders descending, the encumbrance of a bovine body.

Moving heavily across the field, she hears the angry protestations of a woman, whose voice has the force of wild wind. Clouds mass malevolently.

Hera is raging at Zeus, her promiscuous consort. "Argus Panoptes. Here!" she shouts. Io looks up and sees, through a gap in the clouds, a hundred eyes, their blinding stare assessing vast tracts of land. "Tie that cow to a tree in Nemea!" screams Hera.

Silence. The eyes belong to a being of black cloud. It descends in a great wind. Io is lifted from her feet and borne across the desolate land to Nemea. A rope is flung by invisible hands around her neck and she is tethered to an olive tree.

Night comes. Io shivers. She is abandoned. Now rain begins to falls. She strains at the rope but cannot even bend her head to graze. The last vestiges of woman vanish from within.

She does not know that Zeus, outraged, has sent Hermes to free her. But as he approaches on the rain-soaked air, Panoptes' eyes reappear in an all-seeing arc; brilliant against the black. Hermes hides below, close to the olive. He begins to play hauntingly on a flute. The eyes turn to the music. Panoptes' great body slowly takes shape; heaped black cloud with intimidating hints of massive limbs. He moves like a storm towards the music.

Hermes appears, lays down his flute and picks up a boulder. He too grows god-like in stature and brings the boulder down with an annihilating blow on Panoptes' head that has now taken dark yet distinct shape. The creature groans; the shock waves from his fall spreading like a purge by Poseidon, across the land. Hermes raises his sword and cuts off the great head. The glazed eyes roll among the olives.

As Hermes releases Io, Hera screams again from above; "I WILL be avenged!"

A male peacock with drab tail feathers, struts through the trees. One by one, Panoptes' eyes roll towards it, condense into a kaleidoscope of colour and settle in the peacock's tail.

Hermes vanishes. Io lows in pain. A great gadfly has bitten her and drawn blood. She moves off, trying to shake the fly free, but it will not leave her.

Io flees north, frets in the great theatre of Dodona, shaking persistently, but still the fly, sent by Hera, buzzes and bites. Io passes by the delta of the river Danube, reaches the Black Sea and crosses the Crimean Bosphorus. She follows the River Hybristes to its source in the Caucasus.

From afar she sees a man, chained to a rock and weeping in anguish; Prometheus, who had made the first men from clay and into whom Zeus had breathed life. Prometheus had given them the secret of fire and they rapidly progressed. Zeus, fearful of their growing power, had chained Prometheus to the rock that rears like the broken tooth of an ageing god. Suddenly, a wide-winged eagle sweeps across the crags and dives to rip out Prometheus' liver. He screams, the sound flung back by the mountain. Io knows the liver will grow again and the eagle will return.

Trembling with trepidation, she heads for Europe through Colchis, the land of the Chalybes, arid Asia Minor and India, filled now with peacocks parading exotic tails before their humble mates.

Io sees camel trains moving like jewels with precious cargoes across the desert; the sharp-edged dunes lifted, like a frayed edge, with fine flurries of sand.

She reaches Ethiopia, whose mountains are walked by a dark, distinctive people, unaware of her presence. She finds the source of the Nile, where pygmies skirmish uselessly, with tall cattle-breeders, who break into the Upper Nile valley from Somaliland and drive the pygmies south.

At last Io glimpses the gleaming pyramids of Egypt, piercing the pearl hot sky; great guardians of the dead built by the barely living.

As she fled, Io had changed from white to violet-red, then gradually to black. Fearfully, she watches what little she can see of her ungainly body. She knows these are the three colours of the moon; white when it is new, red when it glows during harvest, black at waning. The colours also represent the three ages of the Moon Goddess; maiden, nymph and crone.

Io walks through the temples of Egypt; blinded by the beauty of paintings for the dead; flamboyant familiarity to sustain ghosts in a sunless country.

Zeus breathes in her ear and slowly her woman's form replaces that of the clumsy cow. She is exhausted, bewildered, lost and eyed with lust by graceful Egyptians on their way to worship.

The man, resplendent with jewels, steps from a shadow and, taking her arm, bears her to a house, shuttered to the sun. He caresses and cajoles her and she lies with him in the shadows for four days.

He is Telegonus and he disappears as silently as he had come. Nine months vanish as though time has been drawn into infinity. Io gives birth to Epaphus. But he is not the child of Telegonus; he is bull-like and bears the mark of Zeus. He would become known as Apis, the divine bull and, with intuition granted by the gods, Io perceives that she will found the worship of Isis.

Anula wakes, possessed still by the dream. Tyraeus is watching her; his eyes hard on her face, still lax and uncomprehending after sleep. Slowly, he smiles, his faces lit strangely by some inner transformation.

He approaches, takes her hand and leads her from the room. Liriam, folded in darkness, sleeps. Trulith is slumped over her drum. Anula and Tyraeus leave the laboratory and head for the abandoned land beyond the city. The web-like buildings fade. Black dust grows dense under their feet. Glittering fragments fly in their wake.

They pause. Turn to each other. Tyraeus runs mercurial hands along Anula's glowing body. He fixes his eight strange eyes on the woman who still wavers like a flame waiting to be fanned. One by one, his four lips kiss her, each kiss more intense, until Anula falls to the sombre ground where the heat of her embryonic fire increases.

Tyraeus hisses as he explores the flame flesh, bleats as he lowers his weight and roars as he is borne ecstatically through stars. Anula and Tyraeus lie locked all night in the motionless dust. They exist now beyond the collapse of time and place.

Liriam wakes before dawn. Instinctively she knows, before gazing from her blackness, that Tyraeus and Anula have gone.

She rises; a sinister, pulsating mass, indistinguishable from the floor and claustrophobic walls. She flounces from the room, brushing past Trulith who wakes and drops her drum. In seconds, she stands outside, trembling in the cold dawn.

She reaches to the still bright stars and fragments of stardust fall like precious stones into her outstretched hands. She moves like a lost shadow through the city to the unpredictable reaches of dark dust. Irrationally, the dust has held the hurried footprints of Anula as she had fled with Tyraeus. His feet had not touched the ground.

Liriam unfolds one hand and begins to drop the star jewels into the footprints where, maliciously, they gleam. Subtle variations of the spectrum dance and coalesce, honing sharp points of light and mineral malevolence.

Liriam folds within her lengthening shadow and wills Anula to leave Tyraeus, as dawn strokes at the edges of the night.

Anula wakes, rolls from under Tyraeus, stands up and listens. On the wind half formed words whisper. She looks involuntarily at her bare feet and sees her footprints of the previous night, glittering back to the city.

Briefly she looks at Tyraeus, sleeping with his four fine heads thrown back and, unable to resist, begins placing her feet in the footprints. They do not fit. The footprints face in the opposite direction and the jewels strike deep into the soles of her feet. Yet she is compelled to continue, taking one painful step after another towards the city.

She sees Liriam at its limits, smiling triumphantly, her long hands hanging empty at her sides. Anula pauses and carefully lifts her feet from the tortuous prints. She raises her flame-flecked arms and stands on the tips of her burning feet, unable to place them fully on the ground.

The wind utters inaudible words, lifting her gently under the arms. Anula fleetingly sees the great globe of Jupiter, commanding a distant universe.

Her limbs fade as, slowly, she turns to cloud; chemicals creep where her body had been; phosphorus, hydrogen, helium and, defining her limits, icy crystals that glint in the new day. She comprises the essence of Jupiter, which influenced Io, the fire-filled moon.

The wind washes under her feet, bearing her up, until, looking back, she sees Tyraeus still sleeping in the dust; a curious composite; terrifying yet irresistibly beautiful. She is simultaneously captivated and repulsed.

Anula glides on perverse air pockets, first one way then another. She rises, leaves the saddened city and feels almost able to touch the stars that grow fainter but do not fade with the day.

The wind wrestles with a stronger will. Liriam watches the cloud being drift; a little darker than the sky through which she is drawn. She mutters an angry incantation and again, stretching long hands with painful intensity, she conjures a floating bag of fine gold. It flutters in the floundering wind and grows - a great net to catch celestial fish.

Billowing with clear intent, it encircles Anula; the cloud woman crumpling, with a low moan, within.

Laughing, Liriam reels in the net. It contracts and Anula shrinks. Bereft of sensation she is carried back to the laboratory and delivered for safe keeping to an implacable assistant, who, in silence, had been waiting for Ishalla's instructions. She dares not look inside the bag, sensing some notorious night magic has wrought a terrible transformation.

Night enfolds the laboratory. Ishalla, who had been examining the other moon rocks, sleeps. The golden bag is motionless. Its pallid guardian holds one handle as he dreams. Suddenly, the handle twitches, then works free of his hand and writhes up his arm to his neck. With three rapid twists, it tightens and, without a word, he dies.

Liriam wakes, aware of some defiance. She enters the laboratory to see the first flames of a re-emerging Anula licking at the golden mesh. Liriam grabs the bag and swings it from the building, through the moon cold streets, back to the blackened land beyond.

She visualises Saturn, the Titan of that universe where she senses disruption was spawned, and conjures one of the planet's ferocious winds; its speed beyond the grasp of man and the mutations of her world.

The wind snatches the bag from her hand, leaving a trail of sparks, like a pathway to Hell, in the night.

"Go to Hades!" Liriam cries.

Ishalla wakes to find her assistant unconscious and the bag gone. Instinctively, she knows better than to query the inexplicable events of this new universe. She takes the moon rock from Charon, Pluto's moon, from the incubator.

The rock begins to breathe beneath the microscope; an uneven inhalation, implying perversion. Slowly, the suggestion of a hunched homunculus emerges, swaying as though rowing a boat through invisible water.

The shape grows no more and for several hours Ishalla waits. She walks and wonders, but as another day draws to a close, the hunched being steps awkwardly from the rock. Now clearly formed as a miniature, mutated man, he looks imploringly at Ishalla and continues to make rowing motions. Charon, who ferries souls to Hades, thinks Ishalla.

Liriam returns and examines the homunculus. "I know you!" she utters. "Uri, a boatman who navigates the stars. I saw you in a dream." But she sees too an older version of the manifestation, like a clone from a far millennium. A ferryman who dealt in souls.

"Anula is out there. Condemn her to death and the Underworld," hisses Liriam.

Ishalla watches helplessly as Uri shimmers to full height, then oscillates as though uncertain whether or not to exist. But he gains clear characteristics as he follows Liriam into the night.

Confident of her ability to bewilder and enchant, Liriam summons a glowing boat from the deep night sky, reminiscent of that taken each night by Egyptian Ra. It swings, encrusted with glittering particles, to rest at Charon's crooked feet. He places them inside, like a violation of unsullied illusion. They rest on a wispy lining of cloud. Oar-less, he continues to row and the boat sways and lifts like a spellbound bird.

As he flies in pursuit of the fire cloud woman, he is beset by images of another time and an earlier aspect of himself.

The present persists though; the night filled with the whining of grey ghosts, caught on cloud and blinded by stars. They swoop and falter, accuse and bemoan and from the darkness, Uri sees dark poplars in accelerated growth by a stream of starlit water. In his boat lies an insubstantial corpse and beneath its tongue a coin; his payment to ferry the wraith to the River Styx.

Some ghosts, without payment, drift through the starshine and howl at the moon. Suddenly, a raucous bark rends the sky, echoing from the high-strung stars to the silvered moon, and from the swirling black appears a multi-headed dog - Cerberus, the dog-headed son of the Libyan Death Goddess Nephthys, who took souls to the Underworld. Cerberus waited on the far bank to devour intruders or ghostly fugitives.

The sky boat dips and soars, away from the perimeters of Hades. An undulating trail of sparks appears, dancing deliriously among stars, suggesting the vestigial presence of a woman. Her head touches the velvet bowl of sky where stars ceased, as though scooped to be borne elsewhere by an unseen hand. Her intermittent arms swing with the momentum of space in motion. Anula.

Uri still rows, but the sky boat flies of its own volition. The distance between it and Anula's blinding dance does not close. Both travel at the same speed, skimming long reaches of uncharted sky.

Thin dawn breaks. Stars pale. A feeble sun appears. Suddenly the boat is behind Anula; the sparks scattered by the errant wind. They wrap hotly round Uri, with the sensation of a woman's wilful touch. He succumbs to the scintillating caress and lies in the cloud layers of the boat.

It falters, tips and dives. Uri clings to its mist-laden sides as it plunges him into the Underworld he had envisaged and which now rises to meet him with rolling clouds of despair and the howling of lost souls.

Liriam paces through the dark dust. She envisages Tyraeus and the force of longing lifts her from the ground. She spreads her arms which bear her like a bird of black intent through the dawning day.

Tyraeus wakes, feels for Anula and his hands fill with air. Rapidly he rises, circles; his golden wings fanning the grey light of day.

He senses Liriam approaching, trailing night into the dawn. He strives to locate Anula but his perception is clouded by the element of night and the singing of the spheres.

Liriam sees the wings, beating now, and hears her son hiss with impatience as he whirls away. Back in the laboratory Trulith weeps for Liriam.

Ishalla takes the rock from Callisto to the microscope. The microbes are moving and, once more, she waits. This time the transformation is fast; a female homunculus stepping fully formed with a motion of mundane intent. Within minutes she has grown. Her eyes are keen, her bearing matter-of-fact. Yet each of her hands has six fingers and moves as though summoning magic.

"I am Anis. Let me help you," she says simply to Ishalla.

"What, here? In the lab?"

"Yes."

Ishalla - no longer in awe of the miraculous - is relieved. Anis might have the qualities of humanity, yet she is not entirely redolent of the ruined world whirling to its demise beyond the wormhole.

That night Anis feels the stirrings of enchantment; her ability to touch and transform and an onerous obligation materialising from universal matter.

She leaves the laboratory, looks at the sky and feels in its high strung stars and implacable moon, the jibbering spirits of chaos.

She perceives that time, place, cohesion, have collapsed and that the creatures of myth, spawned by the over-active mind of man, have been carried from the depths of dark invention to the geology of a world gone awry. She sees them borne through the wormhole, distorting and encountering creatures of equal confusion in this world where bewildered beings wait to die and others are re-born, possessed by the ghosts of man's mythology.

The emotions that marked those men, women and fallible gods, are once more rife with the need to salve lust, to seize power, to wrest reason from the irrational.

Callisto. Anis, created from the moon named after the nymph, feels her strange influence and the approach of Zeus; the power that is as pervasive now as when the great god held sway in the imagination.

Artemis steps from a stirring vault of vegetation. She holds up strong arms before Anis, who sees her own grow thick with black hair, feels her mouth become foul, her body encased in fur.

As a ponderous black bear, she lumbers into the city; a shadowed hulk against the web-like walls. She is trapped, inarticulate and behind her, she hears a hungry citizen who has strayed from the sad gathering waiting to die.

She begins to run, but her pursuer runs faster. He carries a long shard of glass. He leaps on her rump and is about to plunge in the glass, when Anis is lifted by invisible hands and carried high above the walls and waterways, from the moonlit city into the infinite sky. Zeus has taken her back.

Ishalla feels drawn to the alien void - to Tyraeus, flying multi-faceted through stars, seeking Anula - an enchanted figment of the enigmatic sky. She leaves the laboratory, unable to tolerate Trulith's silent and sinister longing for Liriam. She walks to the city's edge, lifts her arms and, in seconds, is raised, as though by star-struck hands and flung into the dark.

Intimations of Anula float through the black and Ishalla thinks she feels the pain of Tyraeus pulling through the spheres. Discord - an echo of the emotional upheavals on Earth - dissect the swirling stars.

Trulith, motionless, follows Liriam with her eyes. She yearns to touch the epitome of Night, to be consumed by blackness, washing her in sensual waves, until her identity is obliterated.

Liriam, longing for Tyraeus, brushes past the crouching woman, deliberately dislodging her, so she topples and then, pathetically pleads. Liriam, exasperated, strikes her. In her back-handed gesture lies a power of which she was unaware.

Trulith's flesh falls; the flakes phosphorescent in the dark. Her face disintegrates; the disbelieving eyes floating at last alone, until they too, close and vanish. Her body folds and falls gently apart; the fragments fading.

But Trulith has died with a destiny. Her consciousness remains, pulled back in time, through the futile machinations of man. She is Rhea reborn. She is the polluted mountains and burnt-out hills, the stagnant rivers, the foul-heaving seas. She is wracked with the anguish of the dying Earth and drawn into a mythology as miasmic as man's exploitation. Yet she feels the strength of primeval stones stirring in her brittle re-birth.

She reaches from the gloom of the laboratory to the chaos without; her limbs transcending the city's sad symmetry and expanding towards the stars. She draws the chaos to her, stroking and straightening the discordant strands.

Tyraeus and Anula, caught in a vortex of crystalline confusion, sense a softening of the void; the cords of cohesion being gently drawn in co-ordination. Anula re-assembles into a being of soul, mind and half-human flesh. She is aware of muscle and blood, of propulsion through the scintillating stars. As in myth, she is regaining substance. She is returning to the city and the chaos of its creators.

She places star-steeped feet on the ground by a murmuring waterway. A ghostly inhabitant appears - somnolent as though walking in sleep, yet aware of Anula whose presence permeates the night.

He reaches for her, his wraith-like arms extending and encircling, his heavy eyes opening, dropping dreams, as he closes in on the woman who might have been fashioned by the fleeting stars.

The son Anula bears is an uncanny conjoining of earth and air. He grows fast - his flesh with a star-like sheen; instinctual knowledge dancing in his eyes.

Mother, father and son are borne into a buoyant sphere of stardust and solar wind, to confront the essence of Rhea, reaching with maternal anguish from the hollow heavens to the heaving seas.

Anula hovers, awestruck and absorbing, then takes her husband's hand and, followed by the boy, falls faster than the speed of light, to the somnolent city. She tells the people to build a temple to Rhea; a return to ecological essentials that may retrieve the wasted worlds of present and past.

Ishalla skims the limits of the new universe. She sees distorted stars on the spinning point of annihilation. Lights, as though related to the rainbow's spectrum, weave and interchange in a silently seductive dance. Black vortices whirl; widening and contracting; inviting her to enter a sinister void, then denying her access.

She senses Tyraeus - a lonely spirit devoid now of erotic power - searching in vain for Anula. And she is aware of auspicious transformations in the saddened city.

Liriam glowers; her longing for Tyraeus pulsating through her ponderous black soul. But the indications of his flight are faint. The waves of dark endeavour she sends among the stars, disintegrate and fade. She contracts and sees, with sudden insight, an alternative existence.

She is draw into the mythological past, where she fulfilled the triad obligation of Order, Justice and Night. She calms and grows into an authoritative trinity, prepared to participate in a rare regeneration.

She sees the transformation of Anula - her role as priestess in the renewed worship of Rhea. Anula is no longer a rival. She is an integral aspect of the cosmos, about to burst like a star of unprecedented chemistry, into existence.

Tyraeus feels his being deplete. His despair washes in lonely waves across the cosmos. Dying stars bear the lovely imprint of Anula, but her soul has succumbed to an alternative and auspicious role.

With a sigh, relinquishing fulfilment, Tyraeus releases the remnants of sexual obsession, to flow freely among the stars. He becomes a limp element of light, bereft of will; an infinite wanderer; unreachable, unappeasable, unsought. Yet a vestige of the love that comprised his restless flesh, is plucked by Rhea and spun into a universal panacea.

Anis, in the laboratory, is drawn into the alleviation of chaos. She recalls Artemis, and with incantation and a formidable effort of will, conjures a restless replica of the huntress.

"Find Ishalla!" she whispers. She knows that in the laboratory of this haunted and unhappy city, there lies the ability to manufacture a white and pervasive magic that will prevent chaos overwhelming the re-created cosmos.

From the moon rocks, gleaned by an unsuspecting Earthling, past powers spawned by the mind of man have re-emerged, to assert their influence - this time, not with the force of superstitious fear, but with resounding reason.

Rhea - her hands like flowering hills - reaches to the troubled Earth, quelling the moon worshippers' fervour, instilling them instead with a deepening sense of a wider world where nature ebbs, flows, ignites and nurtures change.

The re-created huntress rises on crude currents of air into the swirling sky. Her sight, smell and hearing are acute. She perceives unstable fluctuations - of elements fearful before her focused flight.

Her weathered face reflects the white of the waning moon. She exudes a predator's resolve; an animal anticipation. She senses the anxiety of flesh and blood, borne waywardly through strings of indifferent stars. Ishalla. The huntress extends her supple limbs until they embrace great galaxies of stars and cast a shadow on the moon's wan face.

Ishalla feels a resolute rush of air which throws her, so the stars fly like figments flung at random. She smells the sweat of the huntress obsessed with her quarry and feels the touch of her hands, honed like arrows. She is swept into the orbit of the huntress and whirled away towards the dream-steeped city. She sees the slowly-turning domes, the glinting waterways; the laboratory streaked by star glow.

The people, who had gathered in limbo, stand and look at the pulsating sky. They see no one, but feel a terrifying sense of change. They regain a knowledge of existence. They touch. They are aware of Rhea reaching beneath their feet.

And through the wormhole, on the devastated Earth, humanity shivers and gazes at a galaxy reverberating with the distant transformation.

Rhea runs in rivers - cleansed and softly flowing - and through eroded hills, spread with a new green growth, to lightly touch the moon worshippers, raising them from their knees. Her presence replaces their anguished imaginings.

Slowly, fields flourish, trees reach branches that will bud and flower. Seas retreat from the land they have claimed.

Ishalla enters the laboratory, where the moon rocks - simple samples of geology - lie, as though they have never yielded enchanted shadows of the past. She fingers their pocked surfaces and, thoughtfully, turns them over. Had she merely dreamed the re-emergence of myth and the move through time to regenerate the present?

She walks towards the room where Liriam had lived. The passage ends in a stark white wall. Trulith has vanished.

But in the laboratory, Anis is turning over the moon rocks in her transparent hands. From them emanate white shafts of light, striking the walls and floors and falling on Ishalla as she re-enters.

The light - a balm to counteract chaos - mystically issues from the moon rocks - like the benevolent residue of the ancient gods and penetrates the walls, envelops the city and washes through the wormhole to the beleaguered Earth. Now her people look with clarity at the gift of re-emergence.

Ishalla walks through the rejuvenated city. The great domes are bathed in white light. She draws it to her like a protective skin and feels earthly aspirations fall away.

Rhea is re-established. A fragile new cosmos has been forged from light and the memory of myth.

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Thank you for reading this book - which I hope you have enjoyed. If you would like to read my other writings, please visit this link to Smashwords.com.

**Author's Note**

Linda Talbot writes fantasy for adults and children. She now lives in Crete and as a journalist in London she specialised in reviewing art, books and theatre, contributing a chapter to a book about Conroy Maddox, the British Surrealist and writing about art for Topos, the German landscape magazine. She has published "Fantasy Book of Food", rhymes, recipes and stories for children; "Five Rides by a River", about life, past and present around the River Waveney in Suffolk; short stories for the British Fantasy Society, and stories and poetry for magazines.

Her next book with Smashwords will be Book Two of "Time Trance of the Gods", more stories loosely based on Greek myths but which move through time, especially the future.

Contact blog: http://lindajtalbot.wordpress.com

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