Stephen Lawhead - Taliesin

From out in the bay, the people looked back. They saw the sickly sky suddenly brighten in the west with a great light that flashed first yellow and then bloodred.

Silence descended over the land. The sea calmed.

Those in the boats held their breath, gripping the gunwales with bloodless hands.

The sound was felt first and heard afterward: the tremendous, shattering, shocking growl from the churning deep. The eastern sky flashed its strange lightning again as the hills began to buckle and quake. Kellios swayed precariously. Charis looked to the palace hill and saw flames flickering among the toppling walls. And over all was the dreadful, hateful sound.

In unthinking desperation, people threw themselves into the harbor to flounder and drown in their panic. Mothers waded into the sea holding their babes aloft. Terrified horses, loosed from their harnesses, careened along the shuddering beach.

The ground lost all solidity. Hills slid down into their valleys, met and melted together. Trees rippled and spun, their roots groaning and popping as the soil beneath them flowed away like water. Houses swayed and crashed into fluid streets, scattering flames and dust. The cries of those trapped on the shifting land assaulted the dusty air like the screams of frightened birds. The sea bubbled and churned as her bed rocked beneath her.

The sky convulsed and spewed fire upon the city. Brimstone, sizzling and stinking, streaked through the tortured air in flaming chunks, plowing furrows in the hills, pelting down into the heaving wreckage, destroying the temple in plumes of gray smoke and white fire. Stone burned; once-bright or-ichalcum rooftops melted and ran. Above the temple, soot-filled smoke rose thick in the air, bearing the stench of burning fat and flesh.

The whole countryside was soon engulfed in flame. Fire raked the hillsides; smoke billowed up and up to flatten and spread like an enormous hand on the upper wind, blotting out the new-risen moon.

The boats lurched in the troubled water as the stone quay collapsed and slid into the water, dragging screaming thousands with it. Charis watched it all with cold and ruthless objectivity, feeling nothing.

The destruction continued through the night as the boats bobbed and drifted in the harbor. The ghostly moon shone darkly over the bay, and vainly the survivors scanned the horizon for any sign of the rescuing ships. Charis watched the faces of those around her and saw grim hope dissolving slowly into despair as time dragged on. “They will come,” she whispered to herself, knowing that as the boats drifted further and further away from land, their chances of survival decreased. “They will find us.”

Near midnight Charis forced herself to swallow a mouthful of food and a little water. She slept and awakened at dawn to see the doomed land thrashing in its death throes… and still Belyn did not appear with die captured ships.

Atlantis writhed and heaved; the mountains sighed and shook themselves out like folds in clothing; the water crashed on the trembling shore; Kellios burned, and south, along the coast, the smoke from other cities ascended on high, darkening the morning sky to an unnatural twilight. All the while the stars struck down through the gloom, bursting on the ruined land and plunging into the water.

Slowly, terribly, remorselessly, on and on it went.

Near midday, though the sky was dark as deepest night, the iron-dark clouds over the land flashed orange and red.

The air shivered and a searing wind flattened the waves as the sound reached them a moment later: an explosion so enormous that the sea stood up in sharp knifeblade waves and the concussion reached them first as a keening howl-which was the pressure wave ripping rocks and trees from the ground- and then as a deafening, sense-numbing roar.

Atlas itself had exploded in a volcanic seizure which split the mighty mountain from its snow-capped crown to its deep granite roots, hurling the pulverized mass into the tortured air. But before the debris could begin its freefall descent, another eruption gouged the middle from the mountain, gutting it in a fiery violet flash, spewing cinder and smoke and fire and molten stone high, high into the atmosphere. In the blink of an eye Atlas became a turbulent column of fire-streaked gas and smoke.

Battered and deafened by the horrendous blast, the people in the boats clung helplessly to one another-some moaning incoherently, others mute, all stunned and bewildered as whole mountain ranges crumbled and sank before their eyes.

The sea, choppy and confused, now boiled as the flaming rock and mud struck its littered surface. One boat, near Charis, was hit by a smoldering chunk of magma and sank instantly, dragging the two other boats down with it. Water cascaded over the nearby boats in a streaming spray.

Charis caught a movement out of the corner of her eye and turned her head toward land just in time to see the tidal wave cast up by the explosion, rushing at them with stupefying speed.

The people sat paralyzed as the wall of water swept nearer; there was no time to scream or look away. Charis felt the boat tilt up beneath her and clawed at one of the thick cargo ropes as the wave slammed into the boat, lifting it high and rolling it over in a single sweeping motion.

Sky and sea changed places. All was wet, choking darkness. Charis’ hands were ripped from the rope and she was slammed against the gunwale. She would have been thrown from the boat but for the water cascading over her, pressing her down with crushing force.

It happened in an instant. The boats rolled, righted, and the tidal wave rushed on, leaving the survivors half-drowned and gasping for breath. Charis dragged herself upright coughing and sputtering, regurgitating bitter brine; she shook the stinging water from her eyes. The other boats spun in the swell, some of them listing heavily, full of water, and Charis saw that there were fewer now than there had been moments before.

The sky was a gruesome gray-green soup of cloud and smoke, tinged with angry red streaks above the earth where the disemboweled remains of Atlantis trembled and quaked, her once-fair body broken and sundered by hideous paroxysms. The people looked on dumbly, mouths slack, eyes dead with shock.

The boats drifted. Time hung suspended between day and night in a hideous twilight, volcanic steam and smoke steadily clotting the sky, and the dire sounds of fatal convulsions still rumbling across the water. Oceanus grew gradually more calm until the only sound heard was the gentle slap of water and the occasional chunk of floating debris nudging the sides of the boats.

Charis, raising her head now and then, continued to scan the far horizon. But as the numbing hours passed, even her steadfast spirits began to flag and she made her reconnaissance less frequently. The day passed, to be followed by a long, wearying, fitful night in which sleep came as a blessed refuge, too brief by far. The survivors-less than three hundred remaining-huddled in the drifting boats and gazed at their tortured land, trembling beneath its torment.

Dawn arrived with no sunrise, just a minute lightening of the slate-dark heavens, and another interminable day began. The boats drifted; the remnant waited. Charis wondered whether it would not have been better simply to stay in the palace and let the walls fall in upon her, upon them all.

It was Annubi who saw the sail first. He was in the boat next to the one Charis was in, and the two had drifted close. “Charis,” he said softly. She raised her head from its rest on her folded arms. “Charis, look to the north and tell me what you see.”

She looked long and then stood. “Is it a sail? A ship? Annubi, is it?”

They watched, squinting hard at the tiny square on the horizon, dark-hued in the gloom, the ship carrying it still too far away to be recognized. The sail drew slowly closer. Soon others saw it too, raising a clamor in the surrounding boats, some waving articles of clothing to draw the ship to them.