Stephen Lawhead - Taliesin

They crouched together under the canvas and Charis realized that her companions were Lile and little Morgian, their faces white beneath smeared soot, hair gray with ash. Lile peered at her blankly, without recognition. I must look as unnatural to her, Charis thought; she does not know who I am.

“Lile,” she said, reaching out her hand. “It is Charis, Lile. We are alive and we are going to survive. Do you hear? We will live.” Morgian whimpered softly, but Lile did not respond; she turned her face to stare out at the ghastly hail.

The mountainous wave that followed the last explosion lifted the light ships precariously high before sending them plunging down into the deep-riven trough. The wave passed beneath them, hurtling on its way across wide Oceanus, building power and speed as it went. The thought of what that wave would do to the first landmass it encountered made Charis shudder.

When the firestorm had passed, Charis and Lile threw off the sailcloth and looked out across the water into an immense impenetrable curtain of smoke and dust all around, so thick they could no longer see the ships nearest them.

Through the interminable night, the triremes drifted in a dead calm sea. Survivors collapsed, slept where they fell, awakening to a murky sunrise. The sails hung limp and useless from the masts. Ash still drifted like snow, coating the water with a foul, thick sludge. The dense air stank of sulfur.

For three days the ships drifted idly in the still water. On the fourth day the sun rose as a pale, gray disk, burning through the brown sackcloth sky. By midday a fitful breeze out of the south scattered the last tattered remnants of smoke, and the people looked out across Oceanus. Where Atlantis had been there was nothing now but a dull expanse of filthy water. Not a rock, not a grain of sand, was left. Atlantis was gone and only the faintest wisp of steam rising from a vast seam of bubbles marked the place where it lay.

Atlantis was no more.

What shall I write of the hard years, the terrible years, years of despair, disease, death… What is there to say-that we struggled, starved, ached, bled, and suffered in every one of a thousand different ways?

We did this.

We did more. We survived and forced a cold and hostile land to yield a home.

After nearly four grim, wretched, restless months aboard our crippled ships we landed on the rock-bound western coast of a land called Ynys Prydein, a cloudbound island of mist-covered mountains and soft green hills far to the east and north.

There were few inhabitants of the narrow spit of land where we made our landfall, but those few received us with respect despite all their suspicious, backward ways. Slight and short of stature, hair and eyes dark like the forest creatures they resembled, these people, who called themselves Cerniui, lived crudely in small holdings of wood and mud. We could not speak to them; speech was hopeless. Their language was a meaningless tangle of soft gutturals and willowy sibilance, not speech at all. Yet, somehow we made our desires known to them and they were eager to provide for our needs, looking upon us as very gods and goddesses.

We stayed with them two seasons, waiting for the fourth ship which, sadly, never came. Kian, Elaine, and all the rest were lost, and we mourned them. Then we moved deeper into the land, beyond a range of low mountains, sacred to the Cerniui, to a region of rich woodlands, lakes, and fair glades which Belyn had surveyed and Believed could be made to furnish us with the means of survival. Thinly populated to begin with, there were none to oppose us; the savages we did encounter fled at the mere sight of us, abandoning home and livestock without lifting a hand, so strong was their terror.

We named our new land Sarras, after the home we had left behind. But to our diminuitive neighbors it soon became known as Llyn Llyonis-their approximation of Atlantis. And here, in Llyn Llyonis, we began to make a life in this rough and unsparing land.

Just beyond the northernmost border of the land Belyn surveyed stood a great hill surrounded by marshland with a very broad but shallow lake beside it. Avallach claimed this hill on which to build his palace; Belyn remained in the south, settling his remnant in Llyn Llyonis, on that narrow peninsula jutting out into the sea. Maildun stayed with him. I think Belyn wanted to be near the water to see the missing ship if it ever should arrive.

Avallach’s hill, or Tor as the locals called it, was set in a strange and fantastic landscape: roundly humped hills and wide glens seamed through with darksome, wood-bound rivers and glinting silver streams, with heavy stands of ancient oak, yew, elm, and horse chestnut-a tree so large that an entire herd of cattle could shelter beneath the lofty, spreading branches of just one venerable grandsire of the wood. It was a moody and melancholy place of quiet airs and shadow, of great distances made short and small things made large, a waterworld on dry ground.

It was an old and secretive land, empty, haunting, inhabited only sporadically throughout its long history. In time I came to love this place, with its subtle, shifting light and misty atmosphere, although it never lost its strangeness for me.

In the midst of this eerie landscape stood the Tor. From the top, even before Avallach established his tall gleaming towers there, we had an unlimited view in any direction. At any distance the hill drew all eyes to it, although strangely, from certain nearer vantage points, the Tor disappeared from view.

Building stone was plentiful nearby, and there was good timber for the taking within easy reach. The lakes teemed with trout and perch and pike; the meadows nurtured game of all kinds. Cattle fattened readily on the fertile pastures, and grain grew almost without care. Wild fruits and berries could be found in die wooded glens, along with all varieties of edible herbs.

If not as generous as our lost home, it nevertheless yielded what comfort it possessed. And within a few short years we had built an enviable holding, becoming the source of endless fascination and speculation for the native tribes round about, who never tired of watching us and discussing our activities at extraordinary length among themselves. We observed them, in turn, learning their customs and eventually mastering their bewildering language.

We paid dearly for our gain, however, and the price was high. The climate, chill and perpetually damp, gave rise to a host of diseases which our Atlantian blood had never encountered and could not tolerate. More nights than I care to remember, I stood by helplessly as mysterious feverous maladies carried off my people, steadily dwindling our numbers.

But each year work continued on Avallach’s hilltop palace; his lakes were stocked, fields plowed, orchards planted. Lile, happier than I had ever seen her, took the care of the orchards and gardens as her own particular duty, and seldom could she be found elsewhere than among the dappled leaf-green shadows of her Beloved apple trees. Little Morgian grew up with twigs and blossoms in her hair and rich soil under the nails of her herb-stained fingers.

Annubi grew more and more into himself, living almost entirely alone, shut in his room in the palace. Rarely seen, still more rarely heard, he became a living shade that haunted the dark byways of the palace grounds and the remote high places. The Dumnoni called him Annwn and made him out a god of the Otherworld, their netherland where the dead lingered on in twilight. In this they were very nearly right.

Curiously, Avallach’s wound never completely healed-sometimes forcing him to his bed for several days, whereupon he would conduct the business of his court from a special canopied litter he had constructed. But when he felt better he would resume his activities as before-especially fishing which became his passion. He spent countless hours out on the lake Below the palace. It was a common sight to wake in the morning and see Avallach, like Poseidon plying through dawn’s golden mist in his boat, motionless, fishing spear poised.