Whirlwind (26 page)
David was accustomed to roughhousing with friends, even little skirmishes with school bullies—this was something completely different. Unless he misread their expressions and the force of their fighting, these kids wanted to kill each other.
As if to confirm this, one of the men pitched a club onto the ground near the boys. Another tossed something that glinted as it spun in the air. A boy spotted the club and went for it.
David turned away and walked faster. He laid a hand over his stomach, afraid he would puke on the spot, not that anyone would notice or that the mess would make the square any fouler than it was.
“How can
this
place be so close to that beautiful mountain?” he said. “I don’t get it.”
“Just keep walking,” Xander said.
A commotion drew David’s eyes to the dock road. Men walked into the square, presumably from one of the ships.
They were dressed like soldiers with thick leather vests, arm guards, and greaves covering their knees and shins. Using swords, spears, and whips, they herded a large group of prisoners, the sight of which froze David’s breath. They were nearly identical to Phemus: massive, dressed only in pelts, crazy eyes flashing around. Each was bound in a wooden stock that clamped around his neck and projected beyond his shoulders, where his wrists were also locked in place. Chains looped from stock to stock, keeping them all together. They shuffled, tripped, and lurched along under the constant bite of the soldiers’ weapons.
David backed into his brother.
The soldiers prodded their prisoners toward another corral. Inside were more of the Phemus-like brutes, all in stocks, bumping into each other, glancing around with glazed expressions. A few were more animated than the others, bouncing, chattering like hyenas. David focused on one of them and elbowed Xander in the ribs.
“Hey . . .” Xander said.
“That one closest to us, in the corral!” David said. “Isn’t that—?”
“Monkey Man,” Xander finished. He was one of the two other men who had come out of the portal with Phemus while Xander was putting up the camera in the third-floor hallway. Smaller than the rest, he seemed to make up for his puniness with a fidgety aggression that had scared the tar out of David back in the house. The creature had balanced like a gargoyle on Phemus’s shoulder, then hurled himself down the staircase at the boys. David could make out the man’s bruised and battered face now—evidence that he was indeed the one who’d slammed into the door as they tried to close it, the one David had smacked on the head with the butt of the toy rifle.
A deep voice came from behind them: “He’s a little worse for wear, isn’t he?”
The boys spun and found themselves facing Taksidian.
Taksidian glared at them, a sly smile playing on his lips. His kinky black hair vibrated in the light breeze, dancing against the collar of his black trench coat.
David quickly checked the man’s hands for weapons, but they were empty. After all, what did the guy need one for? His deadliest weapon hovered behind him: Phemus. The brute stared pure hatred into David. His shoulders pumped up and down with the bellows of his lungs. The beard around his mouth parted to show a snarling mouth of canted and broken teeth.
Xander slapped his hand into David’s chest, seizing his tunic. He turned and started to run.
Taksidian sidestepped, and Phemus lurched in. He grabbed each boy by a wrist and hoisted them into the air. David kicked him in the ribs, over and over, all the while squirming and wiggling to get free. But Phemus’s flanks were rock solid and his hand like a vise that embraced most of David’s forearm.
Xander hissed and spat like a wild animal. He clawed at Phemus’s arm. The man merely grinned.
“Let go!” David wailed. He looked into Taksidian’s passive face and said, “You can’t do this!”
But of course David knew he could, especially in a place like this. A quick glance around revealed no concerned faces; hardly anyone at all was watching, and those who were seemed to enjoy the entertainment.
Taksidian raised his hand and called out.
“Froyres, edo parakalo! ”
Three of the soldiers broke away from the group of prisoners and trotted toward them.
“This seems like your kind of place,” Xander said. “Why don’t you just stay here and leave us alone?”
“Oh, I would,” Taksidian said. “But you know it isn’t going to be around much longer. It—”
Something he saw in Xander’s expression made him stop.
He turned to David and smiled at the bewilderment David knew his face reflected.
Taksidian laughed. “You mean, you haven’t figured out where you are?” He held his arm wide and looked around at the square. “Gentlemen, welcome to Atlantis!”
Xander scowled in disbelief. “What?” he said. “The
lost continent
?”
“That’s a myth,” David said.
Taksidian’s eyebrows went up. “So is time travel, right? Now you know better.” He smiled. “So you see why I wouldn’t want to make this my permanent home. As Plato reported, a tidal wave wipes it out in a single day and night.” He examined his wrist, as if checking a watch that wasn’t there. “And that time is fast approaching. Besides, Atlantis already has enough kings, a consortium of them, in fact. I could never be one of them. I could never have the power and wealth here that I can in your time. No matter how much wisdom I bring them, how many slaves, how many women.”
“Women?” Xander said, kicking and jerking around with renewed vigor. “Our
mother
? You brought her
here
? For what? To sell her off, to use her to bargain with?”
His foot made contact with Phemus’s stomach, and the big man flinched. Phemus gave Xander’s arm a quick snap that made him yelp in pain. Taksidian retrieved something from his pocket and slipped it into Phemus’s mouth, as though rewarding an obedient dog with a treat. Phemus chewed happily.
“Her . . .
removal
from your house served multiple purposes,” Taksidian said with a shrug. “But I have to say, I do find useful the benefits awarded to me for such offerings. A private residence, which you saw; my own slave”—he patted Phemus on the back, as a father would—“and the use of others as I need them; an occasional invitation to a party at the palace. Very entertaining.”
“Where is she?” David said. “Let us see her!”
“Ah, I’m afraid some things are beyond even me,” Taksidian said, waving a hand dismissively. “Prizes like her go right to the palace. Something about the American language, as spoken by females, fascinates the Atlantian royalty. Go figure.”
David looked in the direction of the mountaintop castle, but hills on this side of the river blocked it. He said, “The castle, she’s at the castle?”
Taksidian scowled. He used his nails to flip the hair off his face and said, “Feisty woman, your mother. I heard she disappeared, got away.”
“Got away?” David said. “To where?”
“That’s the problem with bringing women from other times,” Taksidian said. “If they wander too close to a por-tal—” He whistled sharply and snapped his fingers open like a magician making a scarf disappear.
“But,” David said, “how do you know she’s not still here?”
“No place to hide in Atlantis,” he said. “And no one goes against the royals. Anyone who saw her would catch her and bring her back.” He shrugged. “Besides, outside of the castle, the portals tends to
take
people who don’t belong in this time, whether they want to go or not. If I knew which world got her, I wouldn’t be looking for a replacement.”
David thought of the other night, when Toria heard Mom calling to her from the third-floor hallway. Someone had been using Wuzzy to lure her up there. “Leave my sister alone!” he screamed. “You . . . you . . . !”
Taksidian waved a hand at him. “Hush,” he said. “Save your strength. You have a long journey ahead.”
FRIDAY, 11:48 A.M.
“Atlantis?” Ed King said. “But I thought it was an enlightened society.”
He and Mike Peterson had been discussing the lost civilization for the past ten minutes. They had agreed to not debate the historical accuracy of its existence and pressed on into the realm of “Let’s pretend it was a real place . . . now what?”
“It probably
was
ahead of its time,” Mike said. “Paleo- historians hypothesize that because of its location between the Ameircan and European continents, it was able to take technological advancements from both and synergistically expound on them, moving ahead faster than either region. Supposedly, it was centuries ahead of the rest of the world in agriculture, architecture, medicine, ship building.” He shook his head. “But
enlightened
? I don’t think so.”
“But wasn’t it Plato’s perfect society?” Ed remembered that Plato had been the first to write about the mythological land, couching it in terms that had historians debating whether Plato was writing fact or fiction.
Mike laughed. “It’s like that telephone game, remember?” he said. “You whisper a sentence into a person’s ear, and he turns to the person on the other side of him and whispers what he heard and remembered. By the time it gets around a whole circle of people, the sentence is something completely different.”
“We played that in school,” Toria said. “It’s funny.”
Mike nodded. “The stories of Atlantis are like that, only with millions of people saying what they
think
they heard and remembered, and through hundreds of generations. Plato said
Athens
was the perfect society. He held up Atlantis as the antithesis of that.” He smiled at Toria’s puzzled expression. “The
opposite
of perfect. It was ruled by a group of kings who were incredibly greedy. They made their own playground out of Mount Cleito, named after the mother of Atlas, whose father was Poseidon. They forced the rest of the citizenry into poverty and servitude, destined to work solely for the benefit of the royal families. Fact is, Atlantis was a society bent on war, on conquering the European and American continents. Everything they did was about acquiring more land, more treasures, more slaves.”
Ed sat back in his chair. He ran his palms over his face, trying to reign in his runaway thoughts. Is this what they faced in Phemus? A soldier from one of history’s most bloodthirsty, battle-hungry societies?
He hoped the brute didn’t return while the kids were in the house alone.
“But Mr. Peterson,” Toria said. “What did Phemus say to me?”
“Phemus?”
“A name we made up,” Dad explained, surprised that he had not asked the question himself. “The voice on the teddy bear. What did he say?”
Mike leaned back in his chair, smiling thinly. “He said, ‘Have you come to play?’ ”
“Play?”
Toria said.
Dad put his hand over hers. “That doesn’t make sense, Mike. We thought . . . I mean, we’re pretty sure it was meant as a warning or threat.”
“Oh,” Mike said. “No doubt it was. Considering the violent games the Atlantians engaged in to prepare their young people for war, Atlantis is the last place you want to go to ‘play.’ ”
Taksidian turned to the soldiers, who had stopped just out of range of the boys’ kicking feet.
“Ayta ta agoria anikoyn sto skafos stin Athina.”
He pointed toward the road David and Xander had been heading for. Streaming from it into the square was a line of children, shackled and chained together. Their eyes were downcast, their hair messy birds’ nests, their clothes nothing but rags. They shuffled forward, chains rattling, as a soldier in the front tugged on a leash and another cracked a whip behind them.
A boy in the corral of fighting children appeared at the fence. Others joined him. They were panting hard, bloody and battered. Still, they grinned and pointed at the chained kids. They began calling out, words David didn’t understand. But he could tell by their tone and sharpness that they were taunts: insults hurled like rocks at kids who were already miserable.
“Your timing is impeccable,” Taksidian told David and Xander. “The Atlantian fleet is just about to set sail for an assault on Athens. Never one to waste a resource, this society uses
all
its members in battle. They have found that children, mostly those captured in previous conquests or their own who show no other aptitude, come in especially handy.”
He stepped close to David, grabbing his knees to stop his legs.
“Imagine,” Taksidian said. “Swabbing decks, washing dishes, stocking pantries.” His nails dug into David’s legs, making him cry out.
“Stop it!” Xander said.
“Now, now,” Taksidian said. “I’m just getting to the fun part. You’ll get to witness the battle firsthand. The Atlantians always send in an advance platoon of children. It seems to confound their enemies, facing a horde of terrified kids.
Once the opposing force gets over the initial shock, they expend valuable arrows and energy, while giving away their hiding spots, to clear the field.”
The chain gang of children stopped beside them. Phemus lowered Xander into the arms of a soldier. They gripped him so tightly, all David could see of his brother’s struggle were flexing muscles. They bound him with shackles and slipped the end of the chain through protruding hoops.
