“The men are afraid,” I said.

“Of course,” said my friend the foreign magician. “Aren’t you?”

“Yes.”

Behind us in the belly of the boat, my crew huddled over their oars, muttering, praying. I felt that was not wise. The Mother, it seemed to me, must have fled our island, far beyond the reach of any man’s voice, long before the little people who honored her. Else why had the great bull of fire under the sea grown so restless, so angry? Even as I thought this, he bellowed. I flinched. Murmuring my own vain prayer, I glanced over my shoulder, north across the choppy waters of the gulf. White steam and black smoke billowed from the peak of the new mountain the bull had shouldered out of the sea. It appeared to be taller than when last I saw it, only two months before. Red as bull’s blood, subterranean flame stained the smoke and steam. Lightning flickered within the column of cloud as the bull thundered again. A warm, caustic ash of burnt stone began to fall. One of the rowers coughed violently.

“None of you need accompany me,” my friend said. “I will go ashore and you may leave.”

I stared at him, perturbed. “But how will you depart? You cannot mean to remain.”

Turning away, he indicated the southern shoreline, where the handsome villas of princes and magnates clustered, white and red, among orchards and terraced fields on the hillsides. Knossos and the seaports of Canaan are impressive from any distance but not beautiful, not as abandoned Thira was beautiful. Several of the newer buildings had slumped, broken backed, when the island shrugged beneath them. A few scarlet columns had cracked or split, revealing the pale wood at their hearts. Below the hillside villas, the humbler dwellings of sailors, fishermen, market gardeners, artisans were less grand, more charming, each with its olive or pomegranate tree and terra-cotta trough for pot herbs and flowers. All of it lost, all of it abandoned—I had not known I was a sentimental man. The trees still lived, though their leaves were dulled by films of ash, but without irrigation flowers and herbs had wilted and died.

I glanced to my ship’s prow where a pottery bowl was filled with the earth of Thira and planted with simple herbs, thyme, oregano, rosemary, an ancient charm meant to keep the home port always in wandering sailors’ eyes. Every morning those herbs received a sailor’s measure of precious fresh water and now they flourished as those on land could not.

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He was no sailor, my friend: he was an entertainer, a mountebank, a poet—a madman. I turned to remonstrate, but said nothing, struck again by his unchanged countenance. I was merely a boy when the magician came to Thira, exotic visitor from an unknown land. Ten years later, he looked no different: austere, handsome, amused. As a boy I had believed him the tallest man in the world. Now that I was a man myself, he still towered over me and every man I had ever met. I had voyaged to Tyre and other towns of Canaan, whence he had permitted us to believe he came, and seen handsome, swarthy men who somewhat resembled but none who matched him.

He smiled.

I turned again, to order landfall, but my mate spoke before I could. “We will not ground the boat. The bull is restless. We must leave.” He addressed my friend. “If you insist on setting foot on this cursed island, sir, you will have to swim.” He had the grace to look ashamed and avoid the magician’s eyes. “You have paid us well, and we thank you, but neither payment nor thanks can benefit any of us beneath the waves or under broken earth.” As if in agreement, the red bull below the waters bellowed again.

The magician inclined his head and smiled again. “Your argument is persuasive. Very well. One word of advice before we part. The bull of the sea, as you call it, will break free very soon. There is nowhere you can sail that you will not hear it. If you are still at sea, remain far from land for a day or longer if you wish to survive to spend your gold. If you are on land, retreat at once from the coast, find the highest ground you may, for the bull’s escape will cause waves mightier than you can imagine to fall on the shores of every land you know.”

For an instant he continued to appear stern, then smiled for the last time and moved to embrace me. “Farewell, old friend.” He bent to untie the sandals from his feet and then pulled loose the dyed linen of his kilt, keeping only stout leather belt and sheathed bronze knife. Before I could think to stop him, he had stepped to the side and leapt. Striking the water, he raised a splash that fell back on us—the droplets of water felt shockingly chill.

“You have sent him to his death,” I said, too shocked to be angry.

“He intended to die already. Better one man than all eleven.”

The mate began to harass the oarsmen into turning the boat about and beating free of Thira’s anchorage onto open sea, where the sail might be raised and a swift wind found back to Anafi, tiny, inhospitable isle of our exile. It was a place of no springs and entirely without snakes and thus, I believed, out of favor with the Mother. When it was decided to flee the bull, I argued we should flee farther than Anafi, west to the great island of our ancestors or much farther east, to the island of copper, but I was one small voice. Unfortunate princes and magnates of Thira would be but small men in Knossos, while the people of the copper island did not speak our language or know our Mother, their own being a strange, savage god who married the king for a year and then demanded he die. In tiny Anafi, Thiriot princes might be kings, magnates princes, though the realm be paltry and unblessed.

I watched my friend swim strongly across the deep waters toward my home. I could see the house where I was born, not the grandest nor yet the meanest. Until the red bull woke, I had never imagined lovely Thira would not be my home—my destination at the end of every voyage: that I would not, someday, wed there and raise my children and finally die. In Anafi was the exiled girl I was meant to marry, a child I scarcely knew and to whom I felt little attachment, small affection. The magician had paid me to bring him back, true (the gold and other goods were in my mother’s safekeeping in her new house above the harbor at Anafi), but it was friendship, old attachment and old affection and stranger bonds, that made me agree. I saw that he had nearly reached the shore, and glanced once at my fearful mate and crew. I dove into the sea.

I have not called my friend the foreign magician by any name, for the one I knew was, it seemed, merely a convenience. When he came from the east, he had us call him Nuh, a name common enough among the people of Canaan. He came aboard my father’s ship from Byblos, though it was not his home, and dwelt with us in my mother’s house for some time until his stories and songs, his sleights of hand and glamors and tricks recommended him to the patronage of wealthier families. He could persuade one of marvels, conjuring flowers from a child’s ears, causing the ring on a man’s finger to vanish, then reappear on his other hand. If a woman among his audience wore an armlet in the form of a serpent, he transformed it for moments from flesh-warmed gold to cool golden-scaled flesh coiling about her arm, tasting the air with its flickering tongue. He made music sound from the empty air, eerie, fluting music such as nobody had ever heard.

Even after he moved on to larger, grander households, he remained friendly with my family. When he met me or my small sister or smaller brother about the town, he greeted us fondly. Whenever my father returned from a voyage abroad, Nuh was certain to congratulate him on the success of his endeavor and attend the feast that celebrated survival and profit. He told stories of Canaan and ancient Egypt, distant lands I should not have believed existed except I knew my father had visited them. He brought to life for his listeners the mighty cities of the Hittites, the antique land of two rivers, the isle of copper to the east, the strange, far western countries where tin was found. Sometimes, not often, he spoke of a place no man of our nation had seen.

Irem of the Thousand Pillars lay far from the sea, many long days’ journey south of Canaan’s ports and farmlands, across stretches of barren desert that would swallow Keftiu, Thira, and the isle of copper whole and not be satisfied. Surrounded by endless wastes of dreary sand was Irem and yet the city thrived, for beneath the bedrock of its foundations lay a subterranean sea of sweet water that might never be exhausted. More ancient than Egypt of the pharaohs was Irem of the Thousand Pillars, and yet more ancient still was the abandoned, ruined, nameless city that stood on the sands just beyond the underground shores of the lightless sea, for that city was older than men or the gods of men, nearly as old as time.

When he spoke of Irem of the Thousand Pillars and its nameless neighbor, Nuh’s eyes would grow distant, bleak and cold. He never said it, but I believed Irem had been his home and he longed for its palaces raised on mighty columns above fertile gardens, its grand avenues and fountains, the colossal statues of its kings, men and women who looked like him. Had he left by choice, I wondered, or if not by choice what terrible act had he performed to be exiled?

I was a romantic, dreamy child, eager to grow up so I might follow my father’s wake across the blue sea to distant shining cities. It never occurred to me that his voyages were labor, as much as the tedious household chores I performed for my mother, nor that he might long for home when he stood in the markets of Canaan and the ports of the Nile delta. One day I, too, would ache to return to Thira, but as a boy I never tired of Nuh’s stories.

He was not my first lover, the foreign magician. As a travelled man, I have learned that our customs are not followed in every land—that, indeed, many people believe us perverse and wicked. Why, they wonder, do we not honor the Mother and our lesser gods with grand temples? Their gods are better pleased if lovely young women and men sell their bodies in the temple for priestly profit than risk their lives dancing with the Mother’s bull. How is it we have never gone to war? Our bravado in trusting to the sea to defend our wealthy cities astonishes them. How can boys on the brink of manhood tolerate being kidnapped by their father’s brothers and friends, married in the Mother’s eyes as if they were girls, and bedded like slaves?

I was carried away at midnight from my mother’s house by a band of raucous bandits, yes, adorned like a bride in tiered skirts and serpent bracelets, poppies and cornflowers, a golden dust of precious saffron around my eyes and on my nipples, the perfumed oil of almonds combed through my hair. Outside a shepherd’s croft in the hills far from town, I was made drunk on unwatered wine. And then a priest wearing a mask of the Mother’s face, the bladders of his leather tits dribbling more wine, his unwieldy leather prick bouncing as he danced—then the priest made me swear awful oaths, and wed me to my father’s youngest, handsomest, merriest friend. And then, while his fellow bandits continued feasting and drinking and singing about the bonfire, my first beloved carried me into the croft and on soft sheepskins fucked me very soundly, made me a man. As has always been done among my people.

Not long after, for now I was a man, I took ship with my father for the first time. We sailed no farther than Keftiu, which I had been taught (though the lesson never took) to consider my true home, yet I saw marvels and acquitted myself well enough. But when we came again to Thira, I learned I was widowed: my handsome, merry husband had eaten bad shellfish in a distant port and died in puking agony.

It was not done for any man to wed a widowed boy. We possessed no temple-brothel where I might offer myself up or find another lithe body on offer. Eventually, of course, when I had built up sufficient fortune, I should take a suitable girl to wife, and it might be that one day some friend would discount my bad luck and invite me to kidnap his son. For the present, though, I was alone and unloved. As was the foreign conjuror, that beautiful, exciting, frightening man.

As ever, the water of Thira’s bay was cold, as chill as if there were snow on the island’s hills instead of hot ash and summer-withered grasses. It was only off other shores that the sea was pleasant. I lost all my breath and nearly replaced it with choking salt water before breaking surface again. Glancing back once, I was relieved for their sakes to see my oarsmen’s sweeps dig into the waves, rise, dip again on steady meter as the boat retreated, unfaltering. My madness was not their concern. I turned again toward my lost home.

Struggling through icy water, I believed I saw something move in the depths below. Something larger than any fish I had ever seen in harbor waters familiar since childhood. The cold would not permit me to pause but I gazed down when I could.

There were more than one, moving about at the margin of darkness where the sun’s light failed in the depths. They were black, so black as to be entirely distinct from the darkness below them, with an oily sheen so that they resembled huge inconstant masses of bitumen. They were not wholesome fish. In some ways they resembled jellyfish, in that their substance was mutable, fluid; in others, those fleshy, immobile, flowerlike creatures that crowd rocks at the water’s edge and sting the finger of the unwise child who touches them. All were bigger than a man my size, though their shapes varied so that it was hard to tell—most appeared larger than the greatest tunny of the open sea. Sometimes they moved slowly, creeping somehow, by extending a portion of their substance like a long arm and then pulling the remainder of the body into that limb, which swelled until it became the entire body again; at others merely drifted as though on invisible currents; sometimes jetted swiftly, with great purpose, the trailing end fluttering like a mantle in high wind.

Perhaps I should have felt fear of these peculiar interlopers—and yet we were very far apart, I splashing at the surface like the drunken fly in your wine cup, they the fantastic creatures painted in its depths. It seemed to me they knew I was there but did not care to notice me. I was irrelevant to their purposes, inconsequential, not worth the effort of turning their innumerable, inconstant eyes like the jellied eggs of frogs on me, still less to capture and…not devour, but absorb my flesh. Were they the interlopers or I? When my ears dipped under water, I believed I heard them speak among themselves in a kind of high, irritating whistle, a repetitive idiot cry made up of no words I knew: Tekeli-li, tekeli-li.

By the time I floundered ashore, I felt nearly dead. My limbs trembled and my teeth chattered. Scrambling across the strand to where the sand was dry and hot, I half-buried myself to bake out the chill.

I was not there very long before a shadow fell on me and my friend said, “Foolish young man.” The long frigid swim had not, it seemed, affected him as it had me. As though I were a tiny child, he lifted me in his arms and carried me up into the town. Once a sharp tremor shook the ground under his feet but he scarcely staggered. At length, he brought me within doors of a deserted house that was not my family’s, through several rooms, until he deposited my unresisting self into a basin of scalding water piped from one of the springs heated by the red bull’s subterranean fires. “Rest,” he said, “recuperate.”

He was gone only a short time but I was beginning to rediscover myself when he returned. Lowering himself into the bath with me, he lifted my head and held a cup to my lips. It was cool, unwatered wine that caused me to choke and sputter first but then went down nicely and began to warm me from the inside. “What were you thinking, my dear?” he asked.

He was no sailor, I told him in many more words: when it came time for him to leave, the smallest abandoned boat would defeat him, he would founder or be lost forever on the trackless waves.

My friend was gentle with me. When my tremors ceased at last, he helped me out of the bath and dried my unresisting limbs. He did not dress me but nor did he dress himself. The summer air was warm—it was only the waters of the bay that were chill. He led me upstairs, to a high open terrace overlooking the town, the harbor, the bull’s smoking mount. We must sit on sun-warmed flags, for it seemed the owners of the house had not abandoned all their furnishings when they joined the exodus to Anafi two months previous. They had abandoned some parts of their larder, however: Nuh offered me morsels of salty dried fish, hard as rocks, leathery strips of salty dried beef, and sweet oil to soften them. There was more wine, a good deal of wine, crisp cool water, and bits of dried fruit. It was no worse than I would eat on any long sea voyage.

We spoke little. I had not inquired before, nor did I now, his reasons for returning to Thira after joining, indeed encouraging, the exodus. Although I had no cause to believe he should know, I asked about the strange sea beasts I had seen.

“Not beasts, precisely. Less than beasts, for they are made things, and in some ways more. They are servants, you might say, who do the bidding of certain…persons whose aims I do not favor. You need not worry. They will not survive.” He looked away, over the bay, and his fine lips formed half a smile within his beard like the pelt of a black lamb. “They like the cold,” he murmured, as if I was to understand the chill of the gulf’s waters to be a consequence of the creatures’ preference.

He said no more. We finished our repast. He led me back indoors.

This was the house of the last family to host him before we all departed for Anafi. In the chamber that had been his remained an adequate pallet on the bed platform. I made a noise when I saw the four bronze hooks embedded in the walls, for I recalled being puzzled by them the first time. “Yes?” he said mildly.

There was also a box, a chest, of unusually fine workmanship—no Thiriot craftsman could match it. I had always avoided inspecting it, both because it was his and because the panels of incomprehensible ornament carved in high relief on its ebon sides and lid made me uneasy. That he had not taken it to Anafi made me think my friend had all along meant to return. When he knelt to open it—something he had not done in my presence before—he muttered a phrase in an unfamiliar language, syllables and sibilants that no human lips ought to utter. My throat tightened. A tremor shook me but I could not determine whether it was the floor beneath my feet or my own muscles, and I took a careful step back. He lifted the lid.

An odor breathed from the yawning chest, at once sickening and intoxicating—as if fragrant lilies bloomed from a decomposing corpse, or aromatic resins and woods and herbs burned atop a mound of fresh shit. I gagged, and hungrily inhaled.

My lover pulled out the oil. I can’t say why I had not on earlier occasions questioned the container though it was fashioned from a substance I had never encountered elsewhere, as if the most transparent quartzes were to be smelted together like copper and tin, then forged into a flask as insubstantial as a bubble on the surface of the sea. The slippery oil within, neither olive nor almond, always smelled to me like new blood.

He drew out the familiar coils of rope and tossed them behind him toward the bed. Twisting through the air, they writhed like the Mother’s serpents. One fell short. Snatching it up from the floor, I ran it through my hands. Braided of cured, oiled leather, it would not chafe and, if one struggled, the knots would draw tighter.

Next would come the switches and batons, supple cane and leather-covered wood, one covered in fine, dense fur, another shaped like an oar’s blade and wrapped in the scaled hide of a Nile crocodile, which made for artful welts. Eagerness settled my uneasy bowels even as I felt increasing distress. I did not believe I had followed my friend with no other desire than to be beaten, and soothed, beaten again until pain became something quite separate from pleasure, until my flesh could no longer contain me. I had meant to rescue him from himself, surely, not beg him to grant me momentary salvation.

As he continued sorting through the implements of gratification in the chest, I turned away. The room’s eastern wall contained a small niche. In another man’s chamber, I would expect to find there an image of our Mother, a figurine of bronze or painted clay. Her arms would be raised, coiled with serpents, while a lock of her hair coiled between life-giving breasts and her great black eyes recognized me, judged me. Perhaps, instead, in some households it might be a heavy-shouldered figure of the red bull, great horns lowered to toss the dancer who grasped them. But it was something else. I moved closer.

It was black, like the beast-things in the bay, shiny, greasy looking, like a congealed lump of bitumen. I could make out no marks of carving or molding, as if it were indeed merely a piece of débris collected for no reason, and yet I could not doubt its intention: that it was a made thing meant to be regarded, contemplated—and I felt it would contemplate me in return if I were not too small to be noticed, a minute spark flickering for an instant amid concerns too vast for a man to comprehend.

Dizzy, I placed the palms of my hands on the wall to either side of the niche. Like the beasts in the water, this…idol was shapeless, its shapelessness altering with each glance, but where they appeared to be membraneous bags of fluid, variable by nature, the entity represented by this object was incomprehensibly complex, incomprehensibly vast. Each glimpse encountered but the tiniest fragment of its being, more difficult to reconcile than a man’s ear and his small toe, or the parts of an island gently sloped and forested to windward, craggy and barren on its leeward shores. If my eyes followed a crease or contour in the oily substance, it seemed always about to resolve into something, something recognizable: the arm of a man or a crab or an octopus’s tentacle, an ass’s jaw, a bull’s horn or the curled horn of a ram or the fierce beak of an eagle or a dolphin’s snout. But always as I was about to grasp that fragment of appearance, I would slip into an abyss of meaninglessness, only to emerge seeking something very different. An aimless, irritating music seemed to have been playing for all my life, as if an idiot child had been given a flute and infinite patience, infinite breath. My temples throbbed with a sullen ache and colors I could not name sparked and bloomed before my eyes.

The conjuror prevented me from falling. He crossed his arms over my ribs and I pressed back against his broad chest and firm belly, grateful for human warmth, gasping for the air that had been too frozen, moments before, to breathe.

“Not now,” he murmured in my ear, and I knew he was contemplating the black idol—seeing more within its enigmatic twists and congealed knots than could ever be visible to me. “Never now, never in your lifetime nor the lifetimes of men or their gods, their worlds, their suns. My lord sleeps and dreams us, and the worlds and all of time dream him. When he wakes….”

The magician did not complete his sentence. I feel that if he had I should not still be breathing. The horrible mad music fluted on, its strident notes muted by distance. I shuddered—unless it was the island beneath the foundations trembling. “Your lord?”

“My lord,” he agreed. Taking my left hand in his, he lifted it and, despite my vain struggle, forced it to touch the black idol. I still feel the searing chill of that momentary contact, which caused me to groan in a high, thin voice and forced tears from my eyes. The slick scar on my index finger does not fade. It aches in the heat of summer and the cold of winter.

“My antics amuse him, now and then when the paths of his dream lead me to him.”

He sounded so calm. I trembled again—I and the island, both, jolting—and I felt a sharp pang in the flesh of my chest. Raising my uninjured hand, I touched the place and discovered fluid oilier, more substantial than sweat. Blood. New red blood smeared on my fingers. My friend moved his own hand, not so much to reveal the blade that had sliced my skin as to press its hilt into my palm. Unthinking, I closed fingers around shaped wood.

Knives, blades, had not before been accessory to our pleasures. Sometimes there was blood, but by the way, never from intentional slicing or gashing or nicking or pricking. The crocodile hide was rough and might open the skin it bruised. There were bites, fingernail scratches. He might fuck me before I was prepared, more roughly than flesh tolerated.

He said nothing as I turned the weapon in my hand. Its fashioning perplexed me: the means by which wooden handle was fastened to metal blade. It appeared inevitable, I could not comprehend a more elegant method, but I had never seen it done nor could I understand the way of it.

The blade itself, too, puzzled me. I did not recognize the metal. It was neither copper nor tin, which any smith can work, nor the stronger, less brittle bronze that masters forge from the two ores, mixed. It was not rare silver or rarer gold, either too soft to be fashioned into useful tools. The craftsmanship was so subtle it scarcely seemed to have been worked at all, no hammer dents or file blemishes, only the smooth, unwavering lines of the white metal and an edge so sharp I didn’t recognize it had cut the testing thumb until I saw welling blood.

My lover bound me. Or I bound him. It was not clear in my mind. One of us was bound spread eagle on the bed, anchored by leather ropes to the hooks in the walls. One of us was thrashed about buttocks and thighs and shoulders until pain and the impossibility of escaping it became a drug like wine. One’s bruises and scrapes were kissed, bathed with cool water and burning wine, anointed with soothing oil, punished again. One of us was marked by that knife, its impossibly sharp blade fashioned of a metal, my lover explained, no person of this world could work. I believe it was him, that I wielded the blade, for my skin carries no scars of that precision, that depth of artistry and affection. One of us was fucked, and again I believe it was him for it would have been the only time.

And all the time the flute went on piping, ceaseless, deranging. Frequently I was overwhelmed by dizzy blackness. Once, my shoulders stroked by the supple leather-bound crop, I twisted to look back at my lover and he did not resemble himself. Rather, I was scourged by a fierce scowling black man—blacker than the very dark persons I have seen in Egypt’s markets, as depthless black as the idol of his lord. His skin gleamed with sweat but his eyes were dull as stones. Once, carving an intricate design I did not understand into his lower back, I discovered the skin my knife cut to be no longer human but tough, pelted animal hide, which nevertheless the blade sliced effortlessly. And then he slipped his bonds, for no rope could restrain boneless tentacles, and then he embraced me with all his limbs, holding me tight and safe until the blackness of his eyes and membraneous wings became the blackness of existence.

I followed him across the sky on leathery black wings to Irem of the Thousand Pillars with its palaces stacked high on columns formed of stone drums a thousand men could not have shifted, and I saw untold thousands of tall, austere men and women going about their business in the markets and gardens and courts. The men resembled my friend, indeed, as I had known him, swarthy and handsome, with oiled beards like the pelts of black lambs. I could not see their bodies, nor the women’s, for all wore voluminous white robes and head cloths bordered in gold and Tyrian purple. We joined a procession of such persons into what seemed a great cavern. I felt it was a temple—I had seen such edifices, in Egypt, in Canaan, though my people do not build them and I had been shy of entering them.

Within, the air smelled of blood and rare woods and the sweat of countless people. It was dark but there were lamps that did not gutter and smoke but burned white and true within transparent shells, illuminating idols of polished stone and polished metal. These gods resembled neither my companion’s lord nor the Mother of my nation nor the idols of any people I have done business with. Some were unholy masses of flesh, hybrid assemblages of limbs, wings, claws, toothy maws, hundreds of blind, staring eyes; yet the majority seemed merely to be enormous crocodiles until I saw that each of their four limbs bore delicate, clever hands. The worship of the folk of Irem was mistaken, I seemed to understand, yet my companion remained charmed by them, unready to destroy them.

And then he led me through the earth to the subterranean sea he had spoken of. I feared to see the amorphous black beasts of Thira’s harbor as we dove deep, but perhaps the waters were not cold enough for their liking, perhaps they preferred salt to sweet.

We came to the labyrinths and catacombs beneath the ancient nameless city—the ruined city of those very crocodile men worshipped as gods at Irem. These strange folk, too, were mistaken: their gods were the misshapen things that appeared equally ill suited to live on earth, in the seas, or soaring in the air. Below the catacombs, I was allowed a glimpse of the strange radiant cavern where the last few thousands of the crocodile people believed themselves still to be alive.

And then we flew up, up, through the labyrinth into the air and high into the sky, beyond the sky. I saw that the world below was round, something that did not trouble me though it was larger than I had imagined—my long sea at the center surrounded by many broad lands, themselves encompassed by illimitable ocean. I saw that all the great works of men were merely scabs on the earth’s flesh, scabs that would heal and slough off and leave no mark, not even scars.

Deep within moon-washed seas I saw—for my eyes were very keen—titanic subaqueous cities inhabited by those same black, formless creatures of the harbor at Thira. My eyes and mind were troubled by the great ashlars that made up the cities’ buildings. Straight lines appeared not straight, angles turned in impossible ways, solid stone was fluid, metamorphic. The black monsters went about their business as if they were people, swimming or creeping along deep stone avenues, serving each other or being served, occasionally eating one another, ensuring their own gods’ comfort.

And these gods, heaps of disordered flesh, were the models for the crocodile folk’s idols. They slept and dreamed, agelessly, uncaring, as they had slept since before there were sensible, thinking beings in the world, nearly since the distant eons of their advent from far shores, far stars. Now and then one might wake for a moment, negligently wreak destruction or as thoughtlessly create, and then as if relieved of an itch subside again into sleep. They amused my companion as often as they irritated him, bound as they were into their minute perception of time and space, this world and others, and now and then he found it entertaining to stir them up, as a child stirs up a nest of ants, or crush one and all its foolish followers.

As we rose still higher, beyond air or the need to breathe, it came to me that the world was not round like a platter but round like a juggler’s ball, a toy, or like a fruit, its rind all the earth and all the sea. As I saw it, this perception seemed merely true, but now it distresses me and I wish to dismiss it. When I stand on the planking of my ship and look out over the sea, I know the surface of the waters to be flat to the farthest circuit of the horizons and I can no longer comprehend how liquid should cling to a globe without cascading off.

We grew vast, my companion and I, vaster than worlds, and we became one.

Beyond time, beyond space, we entered the precinct of his lord. The music made me mad but I was all ears and could not stifle them. Great entities like drifts of stars, the sleeping lord’s waking attendants swirled around us, a ponderous whirlpool larger than time. Sight of these beings—if being could be ascribed to them, for were they not brief unthinking emanations of their master’s dreams?—sight of them maddened me, but I was all eyes which I could not close.

I believe I glimpsed the sleeper, the dreamer. Yet how can that be? I continued living.

I was once again small. A frightened, deranged, bruised young man, I woke crumpled in the round belly of a little fishing boat, adrift on the pathless, star-speckled sea. In one hand I clutched a crude clay statuette of the Mother, whom I now understood to be the foolish fancy of blind, ignorant men, in the other Nuh’s subtle knife. Untangling my limbs, I rose to my knees.

The boat’s mast was stepped but the linen sail not raised. No sail, but leathery black vanes outstretched as though to harness a wind from the stars. My lover clutched the tip of the mast with his octopus tentacles lest he be blown away and whispered in a voice like whistling flutes, “Remember the advice I gave your crew, old friend. And now farewell.”

When he launched himself from the mast, the fragile boat rocked and dipped, nearly swamped. I was thrown again against the ribs of its hull, gaining more bruises for my own ribs. I struggled upright. I thought I still heard the thunderclap beat of his wings, retreating but growing ever louder. I was mistaken.

Not so far as the horizon, the red bull under the sea wrestled into his own awakening. I saw the birth of his fires but then had to clench my eyes shut against blindness, and saw it still through the translucent flesh of my eyelids. I felt the blasting heat of those fires must crisp my skin and char my boat, but it did not. I felt the tremendous thunder of the bull’s waking would deafen me, and perhaps for a time it did—still, years later, I seem to hear its distant echo booming far away. Projectiles of flaming rock, each far larger than my little boat, rocketed forth from his bed beneath the waters and traced black arcs across a sky now brighter than day. Where they fell, geysers of steam blew up and whirlpools of foam roared. My boat was rocked and buffetted but miraculously never struck, never swamped. Perhaps my lover watched over me.

It went on and on forever, the explosive destruction of the cyclopean undersea city it was my lover’s caprice to extinguish. The black beasts whimpered mindless in my ears: Tekeli-li, tekeli-li. The hot ash drifted down.

It was not much later that I sailed within view of little Anafi as the sun rose before me from the sea, yellow and less fearful than the red bull’s fires. I could hear him still grumbling in the far west behind me. My lover’s advice I had not forgotten but I no longer cared for my life.

My boat rose up on a vast swell of the sea until I towered high above the little island and saw the waters withdraw far from its coasts. The ships and small boats moored in Anafi’s paltry bay subsided into the sands and muds of the harbor floor. Hundreds of minute persons, tiny as flocking ants, gathered at windows, on terraces, in the open spaces of the town to witness the marvel. And then the waters returned.

Eventually, I came again to Keftiu. Knossos, city of palaces, great Knossos—tiny Knossos, pathetic Knossos—lay far enough from the shore that it had not been overthrown, though columns had snapped and roofs fallen when the earth shook. Its port, though, and all its great fleet were splintered, and the surviving peoples of my nation demoralized.

I possessed nothing but my battered little boat, having lost the idol of the Mother when first the boat overturned. The small fortune I had accumulated was swept away when the wave took my mother and her new house at Anafi and all the sorrowful exiled princes and magnates of lost Thira. My lover’s subtle knife was not a thing to be bartered.

I possessed nothing but I was fit and able and my sad little boat was more than remained to the merchants and captains and sailors who yet lived in Knossos. So over forgetful years I endeavored to accumulate another small fortune. I did not marry, for that girl was a sodden corpse gnawed by fishes and crabs. As I grew prosperous, I found or purchased lovers who were horrified by the practices of love that would soothe me, and so I continued unsatisfied.

And years later I sailed in a fine new ship to the place that had been Thira, lovely Thira. My crew were all young men: they had never seen my home, knew only dreadful stories of its destruction—were indifferent, unamazed.

My home was gone. The very shape of the island was altered, the outlines of its coasts. I recognized nothing. Where I believed the town had stood in serene jumble on gentle slopes rose sheer, titanic cliffs of jagged new rock. The red bull’s mountain was entirely vanished, as if it had never risen from the sea, but there was a new, small, smoking peak just protruding from unsettled chop where, surely, once had gaped the deepest, coldest gulfs of the ancient harbor and once had stood the subaqueous city of the black creatures and their unknown god.

My home was gone. Standing in the prow of my fine new ship, I looked from this burned and barren unknown land to the earth-filled bowl at my feet, green with herbs from Keftiu—never my home—and silently damned the dreams of young men. I tossed the thing overboard.

I am no longer young but I am not the oldest man I have ever encountered—I don’t imagine I will live so long. Yet I have outlived every man and woman I cared for save one. Him I saw once, years after, in the market of a distant land.

I had changed as he had not, the lover I knew as Nuh and as something other than a man, but though I knew he recognized me as easily as I him we did not speak. Unsmiling, he looked past me, through me, as though I were too small to make out. His eyes were black with vaster visions, larger than any prosperous merchant or unforgotten lover, larger than a world in which merchants and lovers believed themselves persons of substance, of value.

Then he half-mantled his eyes and the lips in his oily black beard smiled as he began to turn away. I pulled from my belt his subtle knife.

What I intended to do with it I do not know. Plunge its sharp blade into his flesh? Carve my own desires and terrors into mine? On the white metal which had always been blank, too clean and keen for blood to stain, were inscribed opaque signs that made my eyes tear, my mind flinch.

Unmanned, I lifted my eyes again. The capricious savior of my little life, changeless companion of my youth, was not to be found amid the throng of foreign and resident merchants. Those strong, clever men continued about their business in the way of men, or ants, unaware, but I no longer heard their voices. In my ears, the red bull once again destroyed my home, a leather-bound crop striped willing flesh as an idiot flute piped. Tekeli-li, tekeli-li, sang black creatures beneath the trackless sea.

I knelt to the sandy paving of that market far from any home I have ever known and laid the knife on the stone. He was not watching but he would know. I had no doubt the subtle knife would return to his possession before I reached the temple-brothel where no gold could buy what I required.

Copyright 2013 Alex Jeffers