David Gibbins - The Gods of Atlantis

Enlil waved his arm dismissively. ‘If you pour blood into the sea, the great shark will come for you. He is hungry, like those gulls.’

‘Then you can kill him with your spear of metal.’

Enlil snorted. ‘I would not waste it. This spear and others like it will make us gods amongst men. When they escaped the deluge, our cousins Adad and Nergal and Ninurta and Annunaki set forth south over land to the great rivers beyond the mountains, and Ishmael and Sethi and Minos sailed through the islands south from Troy, towards the far shore where the great river rises through the desert and waters the oases along its banks. They will found new citadels in those places. But I am the only one with the secret of the new metal, of the alloy that creates the strong copper.’

‘You swore that you would never reveal it. I warned you of its dangers. Men will use it to kill each other.’

‘As long as I alone have the knowledge of the metal, others will bow towards me. I will use that strength to keep peace among men.’

Noah looked at Enlil. He remembered how his brother had seemed a pillar of strength in his lionskin, its torn head and tattered mane now hanging over his shoulders. Herakleos, the Ladies of the West had called him, after the great rock that marked the edge of the Middle Sea, as they showered him with adulation that Noah feared would go to his head. For all Enlil’s bravado, Noah knew that his brother was afraid of what might lie before them, afraid because he had spurned the ways of the shamans who saw the ocean in their spirit journeys, for whom the unending horizon brought not terror as it seemed to bring Enlil and his followers, but instead the rapture Noah felt in the journeys of the mind he took in the spirit cave, journeys where he floated towards the world of their ancestors. ‘We are close,’ Noah said. ‘Look to your own signs. The crystal lights the way forward. The palladion has become heavier, just as our mother prophesied. When the spirit bird flies out from Du-Re towards us, when the palladion becomes as heavy as it felt in the spirit cave in the volcano, there we will find our new Atlantis.’

Enlil put down his spear and lifted a package from the floor of his boat, swaddled in a bearskin. He struggled to hold it, then raised one leg on the thwarts and rested the object on his knee. He pulled a lump of quartz out of a pouch on his belt and held it up, averting his eyes from the glare. ‘The crystal shines because it draws in the sun’s rays through the clouds, and when the sun is setting in the west the crystal shines on that side,’ he said, shoving it back in the pouch. He pointed at the swaddled package. ‘The palladion fell from the sky and was brought from the snows of the north by our ancestors. It becomes heavier now because we are approaching the edge of the world, where the earth meets the heavens. Soon it will become so heavy that it will sink my boat.’

Noah remembered what his mother had told him about the days of their ancestors when the glaciers had reached down almost to the shore of their sea. The palladion was the most sacred of the ironstones they had found on the surface of the ice. Noah remembered seeing Enlil disappear with it into the secret place in the volcano where he had learned to work metal, emerging with it days later in a shape that seemed to copy the circle of stone pillars with lintels that he and his followers had forced the old shamans to erect outside the spirit cave. Enlil had taken the most sacred artefact of their ancestors and made it his own. Now he unwrapped the skin, and Noah saw the crooked cross, its surface smooth and polished. Enlil raised it into the air. ‘I will meld the ironstone with gold to lock the strength within. Then the others will know that I am destined to hold its power.’ He nodded towards Ishtar’s severed head in the front of Noah’s boat. ‘You have your own idols. And you believe your destination is just beyond the horizon. If you know the way, you no longer need the crystal or the palladion to guide you.’

‘Throw the palladion into the sea, my brother. It belongs with the shades of our ancestors, not in your new world. Placate their spirits, and we may yet fulfil our mother’s prophecy.’

‘I will tell your story far and wide, Noah Uta-napishtim, the story of one who had no animals because he had sacrificed them all, and no women.’ Enlil wrapped the palladion back in the bearskin and placed it out of sight, then stood up again with his spear. ‘I will tell how a star of heaven fell from the sky, but it was too heavy for you, and only I could lift it and use its power; and how I wandered through the wilderness in the skin of a lion and crossed the waters of death, how with my own strength I lifted the vault of the sky that covers the abyss. I will tell how the heavens roared and the earth roared too, how daylight failed and darkness fell, lightning flashed, the clouds lowered and rained down death. I will call the great fish Humbaba, “toothed monster”, but I will make him a bull-man of the mountains; when he roars, it will be like the fury of the storms we have sailed through, his breath will be like the fire of the volcano and his jaws will be death itself. I will tell how I, Enlil Gilgamesh, slew the beast and rid the world of the spirit demons that your kind had nurtured for so long.’ He stomped the spear. ‘And as for you, my brother, I will tell how I led you to the ends of the earth, the last of the shamans, how I cast you away in darkness, to the place from which none who enter ever return, down the road from which there is no coming back. I will call your mountain not Du-Re, but Nisir, after our mother, as it is for her memory that I have kept you alive and brought you this far, and because this mythical mountain is her creation.’

Noah realized with a sudden empty feeling that his brother had been intending to leave him all along. Enlil had saved him from Atlantis, from horror and death, and had brought him far from the reaches of his vengeful followers who would extinguish all of his kind. ‘On our voyage from Atlantis,’ Enlil continued, ‘I let you carve the old symbol of Atlantis on my pillars, set up where we landed; but when I return, I will topple them, and they will be buried in the earth, and new statues will arise, gods fully formed in the shape of men.’ He heaved up the skin containing the palladion and unwrapped it again. ‘The old symbol will die, but the new one I have fashioned in the palladion will endure through the ages to signify the coming of the gods.’

Noah looked at Enlil. ‘These are brave words, my brother, but perhaps in your story you will come back to seek me again, and I will tell you from my new spirit cave in the mountain the truth about what you have become, that believing you have become a god does not save you from the certainty of death and the spirit journey we all must take.’

Suddenly there was a white flash in the sky. Noah looked down at the water between the clumps of weed. Something was different. He could no longer see into the depths. It was as if the cusp of the underworld had risen up, as if they were now floating on it. He glanced at the sky. A darkness had come, a strange pall, as if they had been cast into shadow. Perhaps Enlil was right; perhaps they had reached the end of the world. Then he looked to the western horizon and saw a towering bank of cloud, billowing and shadowy, streaked with black. The surface of the sea, dead calm for so long, began to shimmer. He felt something they had not felt for days, something coming from the west, ruffling the water. It was wind.

A flash lit the sky again, and a whiteness sped across from a central point like an expanding corona. Noah watched in astonishment as the palladion seemed to catch the light and burn at the edges, a flickering blue aura that pulsed around the ironstone. Enlil swayed back, then gripped the palladion with both hands as the phantasm disappeared. ‘That must be my sign,’ he shouted hoarsely. ‘I will go.’ He put the palladion out of sight in the scuppers and quickly cast off the rope that held the two boats together. He staggered over to the bipod mast lying on the thwarts and heaved it up on its rope. One of the other men crawled over to help him. The mast came upright, and the tattered deerskin sail billowed out. The wind had already strengthened and the boat wallowed away, leaving the mat of weed behind. The sail cracked, taut and full. Enlil shouted across at Noah. ‘We will be blown back to Lixus, and to the pillar at the edge of the Middle Sea. I will topple the stone we left at Lixus to show your passing from the world of men. You have no sail, and you cannot follow. You will remain forever outcast here at the edge of existence, Noah Uta-napishtim. Farewell, my brother.’