“What is Sir Christopher doing about it?”

“Sir Christopher,” said Jim, “is one of the people I want to talk to. I think we need a high-level conference, with everybody being candid for a change.”

“Okay,” I said. “It’s a good idea, Jim. I’ll go today if I can find transportation.”

The look of relief on Jim’s face made me realize how worried he had been.

“I’ll get you there,” he promised. “I’m glad, Sandy. I was afraid you were going to insist on staying with Kore and her crazy boyfriend.”

“I don’t ever want to see that place again.”

“Why? Has something happened?”

“Yes.” I brushed at the knees of my jeans. They were covered with a thin layer of dust. “At first I thought I was just having peculiar dreams. I’ve had them before-about Theseus and Ariadne and the dancing floor-”

His expression stopped me at that point. “Where did you hear about the dancing floor?” he asked sharply.

“A book I was reading last night.”

“Oh.” His face cleared. “I thought maybe you had been up the mountain. You shouldn’t go by yourself; the terrain is pretty rough.”

“Why should I go up there?”

“There’s a level spot higher up, with the remnants of stonework,” Jim explained. “The local people call it the dancing place. There may actually be a folk memory of some ancient ritual. The dances weren’t for entertainment, they had a religious function-”

He broke off with an exclamation, as the rock on which we were sitting shifted sideways. We were facing north, toward the flank of the mountain and the center of the island. We were almost ten miles away from the action, but that wasn’t far enough.

A thick column of slate gray went straight up toward the sun. It looked like one of the pillars that held up the sky in the old legends, and when it broke and spread outward, it was as if the vault of heaven were collapsing in a rain of stone and crumbling mortar. Ash began to fall, and then my ears were overwhelmed by a thundering, bellowing roar-the herds of the Earthshaker in stampede. Solid ground became unstable as water. Deafened, and blinded by terror and the spreading dust, I felt the rock on which I sat heave like a living thing, flinging me flat on the ground. I tried to press myself into the dirt, clawing at it with my nails. Even after the sound stopped, I could hear the echoes inside my head.

Hands caught me around the waist and tried to pull me up. I clutched at dusty weeds with both hands, resisting. Another roar, and another shifting of the earth… I couldn’t breathe. Dust filledmy mouth and nose. I was being buried alive, but the earth wouldn’t let me stay buried, it was shaking and heaving, trying to eject me from its womb.

I must have passed out from sheer terror. When I came back to consciousness, Jim was holding me in his arms and yelling in my ear.

“Come on, Sandy, snap out of it. We’ve got to get down to the village; see if they need help.”

He yanked me to my feet. I looked up. The smoke was a dark, menacing cloud, covering half the sky, hiding the sun. Ash was falling over everything. I was coated with it.

“What about them, up there?” I gasped, nodding in the direction of the villa.

“The villa is solidly built and fairly new. Some of those shacks in the village have been on the verge of collapse for years. There may be a tsunami, a tidal wave. Hurry, Sandy.”

His face was a grotesque mask of dust and streaked blood and rising bruises. My own must have been as bad. My nose and forehead stung where I had rubbed them against the ground.

“Okay,” I said. “Sorry I lost my nerve.”

“Don’t blame you. I’m supposed to be used to quakes but that was the worst I’ve ever experienced. Volcanoes aren’t in my line either. There may be poisonous gases as well as ash in that cloud. We’re in for a rough time.”

We staggered down the path. Tumbled rock had obliterated sections of the way, and at one point we had to jump a foot-wide fissure that had not been there before. We had reached the lower slopes before I realized that something was missing. I should have seen the roof of our house from this point. It was no longer there.

“The house,” I shouted. “ Frederick -”

Jim didn’t stop running, he just changed direction. The closer we got, the more appalling the damage appeared. The house was gone; the tumbled heap of plaster and rubble that had taken its place bore no resemblance to a man-made structure.

We found Frederick in the wreckage of what had been the outer wall of the courtyard. He had gotten a few feet along the path when the wall gave way and caught him. The most horrible thing, to me, was the way the ash had already covered his motionless body with a thin gray film.

He had been thrown down with considerable force. One side of his face was scraped raw. Aside from that, the only damage seemed to be a badly bruised and possibly broken arm. He was out cold, but he groaned when I ran my hands up and down to check for broken ribs, and soon he opened his eyes.

“Yell if it hurts,” I said, and jabbed my thumb into his side.

“My books,” said Frederick. “Are my books buried?”

“They are, and you’re lucky you aren’t,” I said. “How are your legs? Can you walk? There’s no point hanging around here; we haven’t even any water left, much less medical supplies.”

Frederick sat up. He surveyed the situation, his eyes moving from the heap of rubble to the clouded sky, and then back to me, passing over Jim as if he had been invisible.

“I think my arm is broken,” he said. “You had better start digging out-”

“Your books? Forget it. We’ll get you down to the village-assuming there is any village left. Although why I bother, God knows.”

“I have no intention of going to the village,” Frederick said.

“I do.” Jim stood up. “Better take him to the villa, Sandy. If he’ll go.”

“He’ll go. How about you?”

“I must see if they need any help down there.” Jim gnawed at his lip. “Unless you need me-”

“We don’t need you,” Frederick said, with a sneer that would have done credit to Erich von Stroheim on the Late Show. “Run along and play humanitarian. Perhaps you can extract Chris from under a pile of rock and win his undying gratitude.”

Jim gave me an eloquent look and a shrug. I shrugged back.

“As you can see, he’s alive and kicking. Don’t worry about us. I’ll come down later, when I see what’s happened at the villa.”

“Okay.” Jim turned away. I watched him go with an unreasonable sense of abandonment, and then turned back to my father.

“Let’s go. Unless you have any objections to seeing Keller again.”

“Why should I?” Frederick stood up, pushing my hands away as I tried to steady him. I started to say something nasty, but he looked so awful, all dusty and bloody, with his arm hanging limp, that I bit my lip and remained silent.

We started walking. After a few steps I put my arm around him and he let it remain, which was an admission of something, from Frederick. It took us forever to retrace the route that I had covered in a quarter of an hour earlier that day. The path was almost obliterated, and twice we had to detour around cracks that Frederick was too feeble to jump. The air had darkened, not to the quiet blue of evening, but to a sickly grayish shade that made all objects look corroded and rotten. The ash continued to fall. I was coughing, and Frederick ’s breath came in strained gasps. He leaned more and more heavily on me.

When the walls of the villa came into sight I could have wept with relief. They seemed to be intact. As we neared the front gate I saw some evidence of damage. Stones littered the path and the gate itself hung askew. An acrid smell of burning reached my nostrils, and with alarm I remembered the charred debris of Knossos. Fire, spreading from lamps and cooking fires, had caused as much damage as the earthquake itself.

In the courtyard many of the earthenware pots, with their green contents, had tumbled and shattered. The smell of smoke grew stronger.