Stephen Lawhead - Taliesin

In this way, when the first tremors shook the palace hours later, loosing a rain of roof tiles that clattered noisily down in the courtyard, the wagons were already assembled in ranks-ten rows, four abreast-passengers and drivers waiting. Horses reared, their eyes rolling with wild fright in the torchlight. Their handlers leapt forward to drag them down, blindfolding the animals with strips of cloth.

Charis stood on the steps, hands on her hips. “What can be keeping Lile? Must I do it all myself?”

“Princess Charis,” came a voice nearby, “we should take the horses out. If the gates collapsed”

“I know, I know! We are waiting for the king. Go back to your place.”

The man disappeared, and Charis stomped back into the palace to find Lile and Avallach. The second quake struck as she hurried through the long gallery to the king’s chamber. The stone flagging trembled beneath her feet and she heard a distant grinding sound-as if someone were crushing grain between two tremendous querns.

She burst through the door of her father’s room to find Avallach fully dressed and sitting in a chair, Lile at his feet, begging him to get up and come with her. He turned his head as she entered. Ignoring Lile, Charis said, “Father, it is time to go. Everyone is waiting for you to lead them.”

The king shook his head. “I must stay here. My place is here.”

“Your place is with your people.”

“Take Lile and the others. Leave me.”

“We will not go without you, Father,” she said firmly.

“You must go or you will die.”

“Then we will die!” she snapped. “But we will not go without you.”

Avallach rose slowly to his feet; Lile handed him his crutch and led him to the carriage where Annubi and Morgian already waited. Lile and Avallach climbed in and Charis signaled the driver to leave. As soon as the king’s carriage cleared the gate, the other wagons rolled ahead, passing one by one through the outer gates as the ground trembled uneasily beneath the wheels.

Charis waited until the last wagon had cleared the gate and then mounted her horse, pausing in the darkness to look one last time at her ancestral home before leaving it forever. The wagons reached Kellios quickly but found the streets choked with people who had fled their homes and now rushed about in stark panic as one tremor after another shook the ground.

The sound of their wailing was deafening. Charis rode forth, slashing her way through the tumult with her reins, forcing a way through for the wagons to follow. She led her entourage to the harbor and out onto the stone quay, where they stopped to await the ships all desperately hoped would come.

They waited and the sky lightened to a ghastly, sulfurous dawn. From the temple district came the mournful lowing of the bulls. A pall of dust hung over the city like a fog, motionless in the dead air. Annubi strode up and down the quay along the row upon row of wagons. At last he came to stand beside Charis. “It seems to be abating,” he said. “The tremors are losing strength and frequency.”

Charis looked down at his face, pale in the earthly light. “Then we may still have time,” she said.

With the sunrise the tremors stopped and the frightened populace promptly forgot their fear and began going about their normal activities. Those waiting on the quay-nearly five hundred people altogether, the entire population of the palace: masons, artists, carpenters, farmers and herders, stewards and servants and palace functionaries of various types, along with their families, all of whom Charis had promised places in the boats-grew restless as they gawked around at a world that now appeared as solid and permanent as ever.

Charis remained firmly resolved, and as the early hours of the day passed she kept everyone busy transferring the cargo from the wagons to the fishing boats. The sun rose into a stark sky where it lingered interminably, pouring its white heat onto the baking earth Below; and as the burning disk began its downward slide toward the sea, the last of the cargo was secured and still there was no sign of the rescue ships.

The city-dwellers scoffed at the crowd on the quay, taunting, laughing outright, enjoying the spectacle. In the harbor, meanwhile, boats came and went as usual and Kellios itself behaved as if what had taken place only hours before were nothing out of the ordinary.

It was not until the shadows stretched long on the pier that Lile came to Charis and said, “The people are tired, Charis. Perhaps we should go back.”

“No,” Charis told her. “I am tired too, but we cannot go back.”

“We could leave the boats, and if”

Charis turned on her. “Go back to the palace, Lile, and you go to your tomb! There is nothing there but death.”

Lile retreated to keep uneasy vigil with the others, and the long afternoon progressed without event. They ate a simple meal and listened to the nervous wash of the sea back and forth among the footings of the pier as the stifling dusk gathered over the bay, deepening rapidly to night.

And there on the quay, the air thick, oppressive, clinging, they were waiting when they saw the sky suddenly torn with streaking fire as burning stars tumbled earthward, piercing the unnatural stillness with the terrible shriek of their passing, smiting restless Oceanus.

The blazing starfall continued, throwing pillars of writhing steam high into the sky. People from the city poured onto the wharf to gape at the sight. No one laughed now.

From out of the mountains far away came the sound of a mighty and ominous rumble, and the crowd turned to stare in horror at burning stars striking through the heat haze, smashing to earth in a dazzling and deadly rain. Curtained by falling fire, the people of Kellios fled to the sea, swarming the quayside in chaos, fighting one another for places in the small fishing boats that now filled the harbor, bobbing in the uncertain swell and streaming blindly out into the night-dark sea.

“The boats are not coming,” cried someone from one of the wagons. “We have to get away.”

“Silence!” Charis snapped. “We wait.”

“We’re going to die!” someone else whined.

“Then we die like human beings, not fear-crazed animals!”

They waited. Dank, steamy vapors wafted in off the sea, which heaved with an oily swell. Kellios shuddered with the horrid rumbling, shaking the buildings on their foundations, toppling columns from their bases. Many, fearing that the quay would give way, ran screaming back into the city, trampling those who could not avoid them.

By sheer force of her will, Charis kept order among her people, moving amongst them, exhorting them to courage as she had so many times with her dancers in the bullring. An-nubi found her pacing the quay, shouting down the fear mounting around her.

“If the ships do not come soon…”He paused.

“Yes?”

“We may have to go out to meet them.”

“No,” said Charis firmly. “We will wait here for them.” She began pacing again.

Annubi fell into step beside her. “We have time yet, Charis. The boats are ready.”

“Belyn will come,” she said stubbornly.

“I do not doubt it. But he may not be able to reach us.” He lifted a hand into the dead air. “There is no wind for the sails. The ships are floundering tonight.”

Charis turned and peered into the darkness of the harbor and the jostling boats amassed there. “Perhaps you are right,” she relented at last. “We have come this far; we can go farther if need be.”

She turned and began shouting orders. The boats, ninety in all, had been lashed together in threes-two bearing cargo on either side of a passenger vessel. Under the direction of Charis’ overseers the people dispersed among them. And one by one, as each passenger boat was loaded, they struggled into the harbor.