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I watch another row of marble pillars splinter like bones, and a whole section of the roof collapse. I squeeze my eyes closed against it all: the dust and grit, the fear and confusion.
What has happened to him?
And what will happen to me?
The horse’s frenzied pace has finally begun to slow. I secure my hands tighter in his mane, and remind myself to breathe. Right now, there is only one thing I know.
Where I’m going next.
Chapter Twenty-Four
In the grey pre-dawn light the ruins rise up like broken teeth. Instead of wide streets and noble, elegant buildings, the ground is strewn with rubble in every direction, and mounds of stone.
Oh, Sikyon. What have they done to you?
Razed, as though the fist of a god rammed right down upon it from the sky.
I breathe unsteadily.
And this, too, is to be my fault? The feeling is unbearable.
I don’t want to ride on, but I must. It cannot all be destroyed. But even the horse seems to falter at the sight of so much devastation. His large back sways as we turn down what was once the main street. Now it is nothing more than a series of ruins. Great chunks of rock stand in the ground, trails of dust marking their fall from the mountain above. To my right, down the mountainside, I can see the paths some of the falling boulders took, wide enough to push a cart through. Even the buildings that are still standing look precarious and unsafe. Through windows and gaping holes, I see the signs of abandoned life: kitchens with their pots and braziers shattered; cups and bowls and children’s toys jumbled on the earthen floor. Thin, mewling cats roam in and out of the abandoned homes. Everything smells of dust and desolation.
My home.
A home that betrayed me.
And yet still, it was my home.
By the scale of this ruin, there must be many dead, and yet there are no bodies here, or none that I can see. Itmakes me think this place was not abandoned straightaway. Some panicked and fled immediately, I suppose. Others waited, tended to the dead and dying, took the time to pack up their homes, and loot the abandoned ones.
I walk from house to house, looking to see what has been left behind. In some places, a little; in others, a lot. How many of my townspeople escaped? Hundreds? Thousands? Just a few?
I urge the black stallion through the streets, but it seems to me he already knows where I want to go. Maybe he’s drawn, just as I am, to the whisper of disaster. At the next crossroads I study the churned-up mud: many feet—horses and humans—have passed through here, moving every possible way. The survivors did not leave as a convoy, then, but fled piecemeal, in families and groups.
Past the agora, the ruin is not so absolute. Here, too, the cats roam freely as if they, now, are the true owners of Sikyon. But here and there I see shadows move behind windows; shutters twitching as I pass. It has not been entirely abandoned, then.
I see a flicker of movement to my left: a child, picking their way nimbly from the rubble at the back of a house, tripping as they run off, their arms full. Carrying some looted bounty, I suppose. They’re glancing back at me as they run. I must be what scared them off.
“Hey!” I call. “Come back! I won’t hurt you. I just…”
But they’ve already gone.
I lead the horse down the dirt roads to the outskirts of town. When we reach the streets around my old home I slow his pace, the beat of his hooves like a tremor in my spine.
The door of our house hangs wide open, and I dismount with a fast-beating heart.
I loop the horse’s reins over a door post and step inside.
“Dimitra?” I call. “Father?”
My voice ricochets back to me. Of course I did not expect them to answer; of course they are not here. And yet, for a moment, I imagined…
I walk through the rooms and find them emptied out. Anything of value that can be carried is gone. Taken by my family as they rode to safety? Or by the looters who came after?
I have heard what it is like in times of war or disaster: the belongings of the dead are shown little respect. Their homes are overrun, their heirlooms melted down. The very rings are pulled from their fingers.
I just never thought I would witness such a thing in my lifetime.
