Hades Daughter Read Free Page B

briefly in the air, then turned to fly north.
    Their screams sounded like the shriek of a blade on a whetstone.
    Meriam put her hands over her ears and half-crouched, panicked, but not knowing what to do.
    She wanted to run, but she did not know what to run from, or where to run to.
    About her, men, women and children were stumbling from doorways, pulling clothes around themselves, shouting in confusion.
    Something terrible was about to happen. Meriam knew it, just as certainly as she knew that whatever was going to happen was as a result of Ariadne.
    “Why?” Meriam whispered. “Why hate us this much?”
    Then…everything went still. The birds had gone, their panic and their screeching gone with them. The folk who had tumbled from their beds into the village’s open space now stood, their voices quiet, looking south over the beach to the calm sea.
    It was south. Whatever was so very wrong was south.
    A dog whined, then another, and Meriam had the thought that the cacophony of the birds was about to be replaced by an equally frightful shrieking of the village dogs.
    At the very moment that that thought crossed Meriam’s mind, there was a blinding flash of light far to the south. The light, first white then a terrible orange, was reflected both in the thin haze of clouds and in the sea, magnifying its effect a hundredfold.
    Meriam, as all who stood transfixed with her, barely had time to gasp before first they felt their eardrums swell and burst, and then were lifted far off their feet by a pressure blast of such magnitude and heat that most were dead before they hit the ground.
    Those who were not killed in that initial blast died when the molten rock rained from the sky or when, just as the sun finally crested the flaming horizon, the first of six successive tidal waves washed over the lowlying lands of Naxos.
    By the time the sun had reached its noon peak the Aegean world had turned grey and black. Dense clouds of ash, pulverised rock, deadly gases and steam mushroomed twenty miles into the sky and spread over the entire eastern Mediterranean region; thick, choking, poisonous ash drifted down to layer corpses and ruins alike with, eventually, two hundred feet of death.
    The island of Thera, which sat almost halfway between Crete and Naxos, and which contained in its harbour the glorious shining city of Atlantis, had exploded with such force that the entire island—save for a thin, sorry rim of smoking rock—vanished beneath the waves.
    In its dying, Thera poisoned every land and every city within four days’ sailing.
    Thera was only the first, but admittedly the most spectacular, step in Ariadne’s curse. Thera’s eruption not only largely destroyed Naxos, but also the northern coastline of Crete. Tidal waves and the murderous rain of molten rock and ash inundated villages, harbours, and the Great Founding Labyrinth which lay partway between the coast and the city of Knossos, almost two miles inland.
    Thera, Naxos, and Crete—as well as a score of smaller islands within reach of either the initial cataclysmic blast or the tidal waves—were devastated.Further distant, to the north and south in the lands of Greece, Anatolia, the Levant and Egypt, the effects were not so initially devastating, but crept secretly upon the peoples of the region.
    Crops failed for years afterwards, and any man or woman who had breathed too deeply of the ash that continued to trickle out of the sky for months after the initial explosion often succumbed to terrible growths in their lungs in later life. Wells were poisoned, and livestock and children alike sickened and died. People rebelled and overthrew governments and abandoned their gods and their communities. In Egypt a man called Moses used the death that rained down from Thera to force the Pharaoh to set his people free.
    In Athens, Theseus watched as his queen, Phaedre, died in an agonising childbed calling out her sister’s name. In sorrow, he comforted himself with a young