Vassos had heard many stories of the assembling of the Colossus as a child. After the twelve years of its construction, peoples from leagues and leagues away would come to Rhodes to see its magnificence, as the sun glinted off the polished metal.
Vassos had known the statue all his life. It had stood at the entrance to the harbor for fifty-six years — twenty years more than Vassos had been alive. It was a comfortable friend, and like most of his fellow townspeople, he felt innate pride when he thought of the giant harbor sentry. It was, after all, a constant reminder that the people of Rhodes had thwarted the invasion forces of Antigones the One-Eyed.
The statue was a part of daily life for all of the Rhodian citizens now. But daily life had never included the ground shaking like a caught fish in its death throes. Now, as Vassos looked out over the town to the harbor, he beheld the strangest sight of his life: the Colossus was moving!
The buildings in the town swayed violently. Some collapsed. Boats were tossed over the waters like toys. Three fires erupted around the town. But the Colossus was what held Vassos’s gaze. One leg had broken loose from a pedestal, and the other had twisted. The loose leg swung out over the sea, then came back in to the jetty, where the other leg remained. It looked to Vassos like a soldier turning about 180 degrees. Where previously the visage of Helios had faced outward toward the sea, both a welcoming beacon for merchants and sailors, and also a reminder of the fortitude of Rhodes, now the statue faced the trembling city and the sloshing waters of the harbor.
Vassos’s mind was already in a panic, but what he saw next made his mouth fall open, and all reasonable thoughts shut down.
The Colossus took a step.
The long, gigantic bronze leg swept along the jetty toward the town, and the foot planted itself down. Then the left leg lifted up off its pedestal and slid up and ahead of the right. The statue looked for all the world like it was walking toward the city and the distant hill where Vassos gawked in horror.
The rumbling continued, and Vassos thought the ground might buckle and launch him into the sky. Then he saw the ground rupture in several spots along the hillside, gaping gouges in soil and rock. He suddenly worried less about flight and the Colossus, and more about being sucked down into the fiery bowels of Hades. He shut his eyes and squeezed them tightly, hoping the disorientation and nausea from the shaking world would go away.
Then it did. All at once, everything stopped.
His eyes snapped open. The rumble was gone. In the distance he could hear screams on the wind. The Colossus had moved even further toward the town, and now it faced out toward the West, its back to the town again, but it was leaning backward and looking up. Toward the sky.
Then Vassos understood. No. It isn’t looking up.
It was falling over.
Vassos scrambled to his feet and watched as the giant statue fell backward, slamming into the city and crushing homes under its back and limbs. The impact sent up a fluttering wave of dust and debris. A second later came the thundering echo, like the crashing boom of Zeus’s own lightning, and a wind that pushed hard against Vassos’s skin.
When the breeze off the water finally cleared the dirt from the air, Vassos saw the statue’s torso had come loose from the legs. One arm snapped and rolled, crushing more small houses and buildings. The head had broken off and came to rest on its side. Helios’s once proud visage was now shamefully wounded.
Vassos stood shocked for just a moment as his mind took in everything his eyes were showing him. Then something in him snapped, and he understood the need of every able-bodied man to assist in the rescue of those that might have been injured. He ran down the rocky hillside, leaping wide dark ruts in the ground, where the world had been torn asunder. When he reached the congested city, the damage was far worse than he had expected. The quaking Earth had caused more death and destruction than the fall of the statue had, but Vassos knew it would be the statue’s collapse that people would remember — that, and its walking performance. He assisted struggling men and sweaty soldiers for hours, helping bleeding old women, children with broken bones, and even lost and frightened animals wandering aimlessly and scared in the marketplace.
When he finally made his way closer to the harbor and saw the fallen remains of the giant bronze statue, his heart was heavy. Crowds of onlookers simply stood and stared at the fallen idol, now that most of the injured had been tended to and the dead had been carried away. People spoke of the statue’s fall in hushed whispers. Vassos listened, but he quickly realized that very few of the onlookers had seen the statue walk, as he had.
He began to question his own sanity as the days went on and people talked of the devastating earthquake. He wisely kept his impression of the statue walking, as if of its own free will, to himself. Very few folks had been up in the hills to see the entire event as he had, so the stories of how the bronze giant had made it so far from its original stance astride the harbor varied wildly.
But Vassos knew the truth. The mighty image of Helios had walked. He felt certain of one other thing too, and on this point he was in agreement with all of Rhodes. They would rebuild the statue, and it would be mightier than before.
But Vassos and the rest were wrong.
The statue’s ruins would remain on the ground throughout Vassos’s lifetime and for hundreds of lifetimes more. Then, centuries later, a man came with almost one thousand camels, which he traded for the ruins. He had workers slice the ruins apart and load them on several boats over the course of many days. The Colossus of Rhodes left the island in pieces and was never seen again. Rumors abounded of what the man would do with the cut up statue. Some said it was melted down, the bronze refashioned into coins. Others said the swarthy man took the statue to a distant land and had it reassembled. Others still said it was rebuilt only to be toppled again. But the rumors and theories soon abated when the land was attacked once again by invaders — this time from the Arab world. People had other worries now.
The last evidence of the statue, its plaque, which the buyer had callously left behind, disappeared some time during the invasion. But its inscription was remembered in the words of poets and men of letters:
To you, o Sun, the people of Dorian Rhodes set up this bronze statue reaching to Olympus, when they had pacified the waves of war and crowned their city with the spoils taken from the enemy. Not only over the seas but also on land did they kindle the lovely torch of freedom and independence. For to the descendants of Herakles belongs dominion over sea and land.
INITIATIVE
ONE
The pain was everything.
Bound in darkness, the man’s confinement was absolute. If the man’s eyes were open or closed, he couldn’t tell. He perceived no visual difference between the two states. He longed to speak, to use the words, to free himself from the never-ending agony. But his tongue was swollen and dry in his mouth. The dry heat of the room confining him had long ago sucked all moisture from his flesh.
His body — a modern miracle of his own scientific genius — would keep him alive, struggling against the damage caused by incessant heat and dry air. He was given the most meager amount of water daily. It was really just enough to keep him alive. Without the genetic tinkering to his DNA, he would have died long ago.
His body was a marvel, but there was only so much it could do. He needed to use his voice to escape his present confinement, but that ability was denied to him. Each day when the small, slow stream of liquid dribbled into his open and waiting mouth, he quickly swished it around his swollen tongue, hoping to moisten his mouth enough that he might speak the words. But while his mouth and tongue could make the movements, the breath needed to vocalize the sounds never came to him. In the end, he would swallow the tiny portion of water, never feeling it hit his stomach, and the days would go on and on.