Now Hamiathes was king of one of the small mountain valleys. He looked down from his megaron and he saw the world burning and he saw Eugenides and his brother and he could guess the rest. He left his megaron and crossed the river to seek the great goddess in her temple, but her temple was empty. He turned back to the river and met at its bank the river god who was a child of the Sky.
“The world has caught fire,” he told the river.
“I will not burn,” said the river. “I am water.”
“Even water is injured by a great fire,” said Hamiathes, thinking of the burning when the Sky and the Earth were angry with each other.
“Where is the fire?”
“Below us on the plains.”
“Above my course or below it?”
“Below.”
“Then I do not need to worry,” said the river.
“But Eugenides will suffer.”
“Eugenides is the enemy of my father,” said the river, and Hamiathes saw that he would get no offer of help from the river, so he stood for a moment in silence and watched the world burn, and Lyopidus die, and Eugenides burned and did not die.
“Look,” he said to the river, “Eugenides carries the thunderbolts of your father.”
“They are no longer my father’s,” said the sullen river. “Let Hephestia fetch them herself.”
“If you fetched them, you could give them to your father and not to Hephestia,” Hamiathes pointed out.
“Ah,” said the river, and after a moment asked, “Tell me where to change my course that I may fetch the thunderbolts.”
And Hamiathes told him. “If at this point you leave your course and go with all your strength, you will flow across the plain to Eugenides.”
The river did as Hamiathes instructed, and as he flowed across the plain, he cut through the heart of the fire and quenched it, and as he reached Eugenides, his power was almost spent. He swept up the half god along with the thunderbolts because Eugenides would not release them, and the river’s new course carried them both down to the great river, the Seperchia, who was the daughter of the Earth.
She said to the lesser river, “You are tired. Give me the thunderbolts that I may return them to my sister.”
While the smaller river and Seperchia fought for possession of the thunderbolts, Hamiathes went to the temple of the great goddess Hephestia to await her return. And Eugenides, ignored by the two rivers, swam to the bank and pulled himself out of the water, burnt as black as toast. And that is why Eugenides, alone among the gods, is dark-skinned like the Nimbians on the far side of the middle sea.
It was not my favorite story, and I wished I hadn’t brought it to mind just then, when I had work to do.
“Did you know,” I asked the magus, “that when you think someone is very intelligent, you say he is clever enough to steal Hamiathes’s Gift?”
The magus cocked his head. “No, I didn’t. Is it just among your mother’s people?”
I shrugged. “I don’t know. But I know what happened if you tried and got caught.”
“I don’t know that either,” the magus said, surprised by a gap in his scholarship. He wasn’t surprised that I knew. I suppose crime and punishment are things that most thieves keep track of.
“They threw you off the mountain.”
“Maybe that’s what happened to your mother. Maybe that’s why she left Eddis.” He was teasing, doing his best to lift my spirits. He’d either gotten over his anger or was pretending that he had.
“Not threw as in exile,” I said, and described with one hand the arc of someone falling a long distance. “Threw as in over the edge of the mountain.”
“Oh,” he said.
We were all quiet again. It was another quarter of an hour before we heard the sound the magus had been waiting for. It was a variation in the wash of the river beside us. The magus stood and turned to look at it. I did the same, and in the space of a few heartbeats the river disappeared. The flow of its water stopped, came again in slushy bursts over the falls, and then stopped again. It was as if a giant tap somewhere had been turned by the gods, and our ears, which had ceased to register the sound of water, were now pounded by the silence of no water at all.
I stood with my mouth open for a long time as I realized that upstream there was a reservoir and the water that made the Aracthus flowed through a sluice in its dam. At the end of the summer, if the water in the reservoir was too low, then the sluice gate was closed and the river disappeared. I shook my head in wonder.
In the bulging rock where the waterfall had been, there was a recessed doorway. The lintel of the doorway was the rock itself, but set into it were two granite pillars. Between the pillars was a door pierced by narrow slits that were wider in their middles and narrower at the ends. The river water still sprayed through these slits and dropped into the round pool that remained in the basin below.
“I wanted to get here at least a day early, to give you a chance to rest,” said the magus. “The water will begin to flow again just before dawn. You have to be out again before that, as I believe the temple will fill quickly. I assume that you will need these.” He handed me the tools of my trade, wrapped in a soft piece of leather.
I recognized them. “These are mine.”
“Yes, they were the ones taken from you when you were arrested. Not being a thief, I couldn’t otherwise be sure of equipping you properly.”
My stomach was jumping as it hadn’t since the audience with the king. “You already knew then?” I asked.
“Oh, yes, the man you bragged to in the wineshop was an agent of mine. Not just a casual informer.”
I whistled soundlessly as I thought of the twists in this tale. “I need a light,” I said.
“Pol has one for you.”
I looked behind me and saw Pol standing with a lamp in his hand. He gave it to me. “There’s six hours of oil.”
“Do you have a pry bar?” I asked. It was the only necessity that I didn’t habitually carry with the rest of my tools because it was too big. Pol did have one and went back to his pack to fetch it. I walked to the edge of the riverbank. The water left in the pool still rippled against it.
“If my calculations are correct, the water will stop for four nights in a row this year, and this is the second of them. Don’t get yourself drowned on the first try,” said the magus.
Pol handed me the pry bar, and it was a comfort to have it in my hand, even though I could be sure that there was nothing living in the temple. You can’t keep watchdogs someplace that’s underwater all but a few nights of the year. Snakes, though, I thought. Maybe you could keep snakes.
I waited another half an hour until the water flowing through the slits in the doorway had lessened its force. Then I stepped into the pool. Standing up to my ankles in water, I turned back to ask the magus, “Do you know if anyone has tried this before?”
“I believe that several attempts have been made,” he said.
“And?”
“No one came back.”
“From inside?”
“No one who has been inside has returned; no member of any party where someone went inside has returned either. I don’t know how it might happen, but if you fail, we are all lost together.” He smiled and waved one hand in a vague benediction.