The storm had blown its last.
Plato lay sprawled across the stone, half buried in sand.
The quiet wind of dawn gently brushed the sand from his body.
By the time one of the village women came out to fetch water and found him there, the philosopher was already dead. The woman ran to inform Seim the Elder, and within moments a crowd of Elcasians had gathered. They carried Plato back to the small dwelling he had been given for his night’s lodging. Gladius was still there, leaning up against the wall, fast asleep. He awoke with a start.
A physician of the village stuck silver needles into Plato’s arms and legs. The needles were connected to tubes; into these the man poured liquids from several different bottles of glaes. Then many strange and curious devices, the purpose of which baffled Gladius’s imagination, were carried into the house. They made whirring and burbling noises such as those heard when air and liquid mix. Gladius stood rigid in a corner of the room, watching the hurried yet precise movements of the men and women who encircled the sickbed. When the sun had risen quite high in the sky, Plato moaned suddenly, and the men and women slowed their activity.
“There. He will be able to stand in two or three days,” the physician told Gladius. “We must not rush him. He was entirely dead, you see, and needs time to recover.” The Elcasian busied himself picking up the various medical devices that had been placed around the bed. His assistants left the room in silence.
The physician closed the curtains on the windows, straightened the blanket over Plato, and then departed, a wooden box filled with vials of medicine and small surgical instruments tucked under his arm.
The philosopher slept with his head pressed into his pillow, barely moving. At times Gladius feared that his master might yet be dead. His eyes filled with tears as he watched over the old man.
What siren beckoned you out into that raging sandstorm, he wondered, and what did you see there?
The Arab was painfully aware that their great journey had now begun in earnest.
✦ ✦ ✦
Plato spent the next several days drifting somewhere between wakefulness and sleep. Gladius tried speaking to him, but the old man never responded. When Seim visited, the sight of Plato lying there seemed to give him a great deal of pain.
“Elder,” Gladius asked him during one of his visits, “could there be some connection between that custom of your village, the Night of Silence, and my master’s sudden illness?”
Seim gave no reply but stood solemnly, gazing down at Plato. The philosopher was sitting up in bed, his back against the wall, but his eyes stared off into space, seeing nothing.
“Ahem. Master Gladius. The Night of Silence, as I have told you, is a ritual in which the people of our village receive a revelation from our suzerain. Yet not all of us receive this revelation. Only a select few glean anything from the Night when it comes—and those who do are forbidden to speak of what has been revealed to them. Thus, no one knows who in the village has received such enlightenment—not even myself.”
“Hrm,” Gladius muttered. “I suppose that’s fitting for a Night of Silence.”
“In days long past, they say, everyone in the village received revelation from our suzerain. Through the ritual they would learn firsthand about an event in our past. This knowledge brought us closer together in mind and spirit. Now, such togetherness is beyond our grasp. Master Gladius . . . in truth, I have begun to lose confidence that Atlantis, our suzerain, and the revelation ever existed at all.”
“If you seek enlightenment, you’re talking to the wrong man.”
Seim turned to leave the room.
“Elder—” Gladius called out, and the older man hesitated at the door. “Before entering the service of Master Plato, I lived among many people in many lands. Over the course of those earlier years, I adopted the customs and ways of numerous people, different tribes . . . too many to count. I could not have survived otherwise. One thing I discovered is that in the tales and legends told by all of these peoples, there are always stories of destruction and salvation. I’ve wondered why this is. Why would there be so many tales about a horrific destruction and the salvation that followed when no one alive could possibly have witnessed either? The tales seemed too close to truth to be mere fancies, and too inevitable to deny.”
Seim the Elder stepped out the doorway and vanished, leaving Gladius to wonder whether the Elcasian had even heard him.
✦ ✦ ✦
Three days later, a rare rain fell from the muggy morning through to the night, moistening the desert sands.
“Gladius. Today we head west,” Plato announced, standing suddenly.
“M-Master,” Gladius stuttered. “How do you feel?”
“How do I feel? I’m fine. Should I not be?”
“I . . . when did you wake?”
“Gladius,” Plato said, a bit testily. “This rain is the sort of opportunity that comes but once or twice a year. The journey to the west of the Atlas Mountains would be brutal under any other conditions. We must hurry. Prepare for our departure!”
Gladius could hear in his master’s words the obstinacy and sudden passion he knew well. There was no better indicator that Plato had returned to full health. The Arab nodded. “Very well. I will get ready at once,” he said, thinking that all he really needed to do was to fill their donkeys’ water skins and the two would be ready to depart. “Master, do you know which route we will take?”
Plato peered out through the window at the misting rain, seeming lost in thought. “Four days to the northwest of here, west of the Sawai Valley, lies the village of Tovatsue. He awaits us there.”
“Awaits us, Master?”
“Indeed.”
“Ah—who awaits us? When was this appointment made?”
Plato turned to his servant, lifting an eyebrow. “How unlike you, Gladius, to forget such things.”
“I beg your pardon, Master.” Gladius bowed his head, desperately trying to make sense of the old man’s words. Not only had he never heard of any village named Tovatsue, but the name sounded so unfamiliar as to be meaningless to him. What people speaking what language would name a village so? He also wondered who might be waiting for them there—he could recall no such arrangement.
Still milling these questions, Gladius went to call on Seim the Elder to announce their departure.
Three donkeys were laden with food and water skins, and they borrowed a fourth, upon which Plato rode. In the writings that Plato sent to his friend Tethys of Terinth, it is noted that when the philosopher made his farewells, he invited the elder to call on him, back in Greece.
Plato and Gladius left the village in the misting rain alone, Plato having refused Seim’s offer of a guide. The people of the village gathered and stood watching the two travelers depart.
The dampened desert spread out, vast and barren, before Gladius’s eyes. He wondered what was waiting for them on the other side. He cared not whether Tovatsue meant life or death for him; the distinction hardly seemed important.
After they had gone a short distance the two men paused and looked back. Elcasia seemed sunken and faded, far off in the sea of sand behind them.
“Master?” Gladius pointed. “What do you think that might be?” Though he had not noticed it when they entered the village, he could now see a curious structure like a large bowl set on its side, towering a short distance from the houses. It appeared to be fashioned of some kind of thin metal framework.
“That is the suzerain’s tower.”
“Whose tower?”
“Are you quite all right? We met him just the other day.”
I fear you are the one who is not all right, Master, Gladius thought as he chuckled bitterly to himself.
Plato, his thick beard trembling in the desert breeze, stared at the strange bowl looming over the village. It was not the first time he’d seen it, of that he was sure. It was familiar to him, even—yes—surely it was something he had seen dozens upon dozens of times before.
But where?
Plato wracked his brains for some memory of the thing, but every time he felt as if he were about to succeed in dredging it out of the depths, it would slip away, back down to the bottom. With a sigh, the philosopher abandoned his fruitless mental efforts and turned to Gladius.
“Let us go.”
Lost to Plato was the memory that he had seen a bowl-shaped dish tens of times the size of this one over the royal palace of Atlantis—and that he was Orionae, the Atlantean.