They came to the outskirts of Walkeropolis only two hours travel from Neayoruk; sixteen miles or so as the road wound- though Arnstein noted that the journey-stones beside the road were in kilometers. The small forest of crosses on the outskirts were about what he'd expected. Despite that he closed his eyes and gagged helplessly. The ravens and vultures ignored the passersby as they squabbled over tidbits, jumping back a little and waiting when a man pinned to the wood beat his head back and forth and croaked as he tried to scream past a dry swollen tongue.
Put it out of your mind, Arnstein, he thought with grim intensity. You're trying to save your life, and maybe more. Ignore it!
The city proper lay beyond, a mushroom growth with twice the population of Nantucket Town. His eyes went wide in surprise; the reports hadn't prepared him for how alien it looked, neither Mycenaean or modern or anything else he could quite classify. Aqueducts and smokestacks marked a considerable factory district; the buildings there were the same sort of utilitarian adobe-functional he'd noted before, but mostly whitewashed.
The layout was a grid, modified to fit the hilly terrain, with young plane trees lining the streets. Other hillsides were green with gardens and ornamental groves, red and umber tile and shining marble and neat ashlar blocks showing through, mansions and public buildings. Atop one hillside nearby was…
He shook his head. The Mycenaean Greeks worshiped more or less the same pantheon of Gods that their Classical descendants would… would have. But they did it in small shrines, or at hilltop altars, or in groves or caves. They didn't build what he saw there, fluted marble columns around a rectangle with a pitched roof, the stereotypical form of a Greek temple (or English bank) shining in white stone, with a big altar before it and a huge cult-statue glimpsed through bronze screenwork inside the pillars.
The sun caught out points of brightness, gilded Corinthian capitals on the columns, colored terra-cotta on the bas-reliefs of the pediments and metopes, the cartoon-panel-like decorations under the eves and on the triangular spaces at the front above the pillars. A complex of lesser buildings occupied the slopes below. Several other temples were under construction nearby, with a litter of blocks and concrete-mixing troughs and great timber cranes for erecting monolithic pillars.
"Let me guess," Arnstein said again. "The King of Men has set up an organization"-that word had also been borrowed into the Achaean of the Year Ten-"of full-time paid priests-
"The Sacred Collegium, yes."
"-with regional over-priests in the rest of the country all reporting back to someone appointed by him."
"Yes," Odikweos said, shrugging and smiling slightly. "Many have praised his piety in bestowing these beautiful God-houses on the realm, and skilled servants to attend them. Is it any wonder that the Gods have favored him so?"
Was there a slight astringent edge to the Achaean's voice? I hope so, but then I'm listening for my life as well as talking for it. And he wasn't in the backwoods here. This might not be Egypt or Babylon, but it was an old and sophisticated civilization in its way.
Vulnerable, though. Writing had been a rare thing here until Walker came, used only for accounting and administration. From the number of street signs and quasi billboards, he'd put a lot of ooomph into teaching the three R's-and didn't this archaic Greek look odd written in the Latin alphabet! The first generation of literates in any culture tended to be pretty gullible about print. They also didn't have a word for "religion," or a concept of it as something separate from everyday life, that could be manipulated as an entity.
I'll give you any odds that Walker's got his tame priesthood working on some sort of Holy Scripture, too-a pagan Koran or Book of Oracles or something with the King of Men as the Numero Uno favored of Zeus Pater. I wonder what Odikweos would make of that?
There was no need to ask about the structure like a football stadium built into the side of a hill, with a mule-drawn trolley line running out to it. The reports had gone into revolting detail about Walker's revival… or premature invention… of the Roman munera. A crowd was pouring out of it as he watched, animated and brisk, many of them leading or carrying their children, and he could hear the ooompa-ooompa of a band that included a big water organ.
Nor much doubt about the smaller temple of gray-and-red stone on a nearby height. Instead of an exterior altar in front of the building, that had a ten-foot-high double-headed cobra making a circle in gilded cast bronze. It enclosed a sun and moon-black sun, black moon, under the flared fanged heads with their ivory teeth and ruby eyes. A party of women in rich clothing and delicately beautiful masks of black leather and silver led a man with his head covered in a sack up to it. The women stopped and bowed, then made a gesture with both fists clenched before the face, imitating the serpents, before they passed on into the temple proper.
"A few years ago it was just another snake cult," he quoted to himself in a low mutter. "And where's Conan when you need him?"
Behind the snake-sun-moon sigil was another bronze, a statue of a woman with three faces pointing in different directions-the Triple Hekate of the Crossroads. The rest of the figure wasn't at all Greek; more like Kali, multiple arms holding scalpels, bowls, knives, whips, fetters, human hearts-rendered quite accurately-and dancing in a hip-shot posture.
A tablet at the beginning of the road leading up to the building read:
Cold be hand, and heart, and bone;
And cold be sleep, under stone…
Ian Arnstein's lips quirked upward as he read; Tolkien translated quite well into Greek.
Then the ironic humor washed out of him like a candle guttering in a high wind as a long, high scream came down the hill, and he realized the man must have had the bag removed and seen his fate. The scream continued, with chanting running under it like a counterpoint. The skulls all around the temple's metope weren't sculpted replicas. They were the real thing, human bone mounted on polished metal disks, hundreds of them, and as many again on a pyramidal skull rack outside.
That wasn't Greek in inspiration either. Aztec, the way they'd displayed the results of their massacre-sacrifices.
It's like a theme park for demons. Walker and sado-bitch and the others have turned this place into their own multicultural sociopath's Disneyland. Except these are real people they're playing with.
He turned his eyes from Hong's temple and wished he could shut it out of his mind as well. Evil sweltered out of the very stones, like some vile metaphysical ooze that made his soul feel polluted, echoing with the agony within. He'd felt the same before, on a trip to Europe before the Event… at the gate of Dachau.
"This gift from your Island… some of us do not appreciate it here," Odikweos said softly.
"That is not something you can blame on us" Arnstein said. "Hong is an outlaw; were she back on Nantucket, we'd hang her."
He thought of trying to say she was crazy, but the closest you could come to saying that in this language meant literally possessed by spirits. The last thing he wanted to do was back up her claim to divine inspiration.
"Of course you would; she and the King are rebels against your ruler."
"No. We'd hang her for what she's done here."
The Achaean gave a noncommittal toss of his head. It was nearly dark now, the sun sinking crimson on the high peak to the westward; a steam whistle hooted mournfully somewhere.