Chasing the Star Garden: The Airship Racing Chronicles (Volume 1) (17 page)

Chapter 22

W
e snuck past the southern tip of Greece toward the islands just off the shore of the Ottoman mainland in the Aegean Sea. After the excitement that morning, the last thing I wanted was to find myself in the middle of a military conflict. We were lucky. Wherever the Greeks and Ottomans were fighting, it was not over the isles of the ancient world.

It was early evening when we closed in on the location provided by the kaleidoscope. The late summer sun was still in the sky. We would have a few hours left to explore the small isle of Kos. The landscape below the western coast where we flew in was dotted with groves of olive and date trees. When we reached the coordinates indicted by the kaleidoscope, we found ourselves hovering above a cypress grove.

Celeste looked puzzled. “There should be a shrine here. The Kos Aphrodite was kept at the Asclepeion.”

“What was the Asclepeion?” I asked.

“A medical center, like an ancient hospital, built in worship of the god Asclepius. Kos boasted the most famous Asclepeion in the ancient world. That is where Hippocrates learned his trade. People came from all around for healing. It was an enormous temple, probably as large as St. Mark’s Square, with three levels. Thousands of people would come here to take restorative. Yet all I see is trees.”

“Perhaps the passage of time has buried the world you seek,” Sal suggested.

“Well, there is no way to know for sure until we go look.”

I lowered the
Bacchus
to tree level and climbed down the rope ladder. It didn’t take us long to figure out we were in the right place. You couldn’t take two steps without stumbling over a piece of fallen stonework. The problem was that the ruins were a complete disaster. Columns jutted out of the ground, floor stones were half heaved up in the dirt, and chiseled rocks lay everywhere.

Celeste looked completely exasperated. “We’ll need a team of people to dig,” she said. “We’ll need to excavate the site. She’s here. I know it. We’ll just need to unearth her.”

Sal and I exchanged a glance.

“Celeste,” I began, but I was not sure what to say. Even if she did excavate the site, by the time she found what she was looking for, the Dilettanti would be all over the dig.

Celeste looked at me with tears in her large, golden eyes. The early evening sun made her hair sparkle. She was a picture of sadness. “It has to be here,” she whispered desperately.

I turned to Sal to discuss the matter when I noticed he was looking at something in the distance.

“What is it?” I asked him.

“A boy. Just there,” he said.

A young boy, perhaps eight years of age, was looking from us to the ship and back again. He leaned against a wooden staff. His small herd of goats was stepping carefully between the fallen rocks, nibbling on the grass.

“Why don’t we ask him?” I said, gazing at the boy.

Celeste looked puzzled. “Ask him what?”

“Where the statue is. After all, he must know this land,” I replied.

Celeste looked uncertain, but with no better recourse, we decided to give it a try. Cautiously, Sal approached the small boy. The boy looked like his common sense was telling him to cut and run, but sheer nerve made him stay. I liked the lad. Sal knelt down to talk to the boy at eye level. The boy waved his hands toward the balloon then at the landscape around us. After a few moments, Sal stood up, ruffled the boy’s hair, and waved for us to join them.

“I asked him where the Asclepeion was,” Sal told us when we joined him, “and he told me, ‘you’re standing in it,’” he added with a laugh.

I smiled down at the lad. He wore rustic looking cotton trousers and a patched shirt. The child had dirt smeared on his face, and his pants were stained on the knees. His smile was wide and toothy, and his eyes showed innocence rarely seen in children roaming the streets of London. When he clicked at his goats, they obeyed his command. The boy led us uphill through the cypress grove. The goats followed obediently along.

Sal and the boy chatted along the way. “The temple is his family’s grazing land. The boy’s father told him much of the temple was destroyed in an earthquake many years ago, but he knows where we can see the best parts of the ruins,” Sal said.

Celeste smiled, not a coquettish sidelong grin, but a smile of raw joy.

We entered a clearing. There we found what we had initially expected: the ruins of the temple. Their view had been hidden by a rise in the earth and a thicket of trees. What was left of the stone walls outlined the space. In one area, the walls of the temple were still erect. Temple buildings, constructed with small round stones, shimmered with a golden hue in the fading sunlight. Fallen marble columns lay amongst the wildflowers. Some of the ruins seemed to be in relatively good condition. The buildings were mainly roofless, but you could still see the arched hallways with ornately chiseled stonework.

The boy was talking quickly and pointing toward a rise before us.

Sal nodded.

“You can see, just there, how the earth does not rise in a natural way but looks more squared. Under the earth, the temple expands upward toward a shrine that would have crowned it at the top. You can just see the exposed stairs. Your temple is yet undiscovered, Celeste,” Sal said then turned to the boy and asked the child a question.

The boy looked thoughtful then pointed toward an area in the ruins.

Sal smiled happily. His silver eyes crinkled in the corners. “I asked him if he knows of any statues within the ruins. He said the statues are ‘in there,’” Sal said, following the boy’s gaze.

“Oh, please, let’s take a look,” Celeste said excitedly to the boy who smiled up at her in return. The boy led us through the high grass toward the ruin. Along the way, he pointed to fallen stones which bore chiseled lion’s heads, leaves, and flowers. I could not help but notice the snakes, many very large, lying on the stones soaking up the last of the sunlight.

“There are snakes everywhere,” I commented to Sal, motioning toward the copper, almost yellow, colored snakes lying on the rocks.

The boy followed my glance and stopped. He motioned to the snakes and began explaining.

“These are temple snakes,” Sal translated. “They used snakes during the healing rituals in worship of Asclepius. The temple is gone, but its snakes remain. They are not venomous. In fact, his grandmother still puts a snake in his bed when he is sick. He says it stays in the bed with him until he is well then crawls away.”

The boy plucked one of the smaller snakes from a stone. Celeste took a step backward. He handed the creature, which wiggled to be free of his grasp, to me.

I extended my hand. The boy set the snake in my palm. The small creature curled into a ball and lifted its small head as if to look at me.

The boy smiled up at me and spoke.

Sal translated, “He says it wants to help you.”

I looked at the little creature. “Sorry, but I think it will take longer than you have,” I said, gently setting the creature back down on one of the warm stones.

The lad grinned and led onward. We moved into the temple and travelled the ruined hallways of the ancient hospital. Like any other English child, I had wandered around my share of ruined medieval haunts, but this was totally different. The structure was ancient. It both awed and unnerved me. I remembered feeling the same magical sensation the first time I’d flown over Stonehenge.

The boy chatted, Sal occasionally translating details of interest. I was mostly quiet as I absorbed the enormity of the experience. I understood then why Richard Payne Knight and the others wanted to haul the ancient world back to London. There was something magical about being able to touch the past. I reached out to feel the stone walls, my fingertips stroking the rough stones. How many people had come before me to this ancient place? What had they been searching for? I closed my eyes, just for a moment, and tried to envision the place as a bustling place of healing. The thought of it touched me deeply.

The boy led us to a part of the wall that was lined with deep niches. In one niche, a working fountain poured water from an image of Pan into a half-moon shaped basin. The lad scooped up a drink with his cupped hand, encouraged us all to do the same, and then waved us onward.

We all drank, Celeste muttering a little prayer to Pan, and then Sal and Celeste followed the boy toward the eastern side of the terrace, closer to the cypress grove over which the
Bacchus
hovered. I sat on the stone retaining wall around the spring.

I waved to Sal. “I’ll catch up,” I called.

He nodded.

It was terribly hot in the late afternoon sun. My stomach was feeling nauseous. I swore to myself I would never take an injection of morphine again. A breeze coming off the sea cut the heat, but I was sweating nonetheless. I took off my cap, dipped my hand in the water, and mopped down the back of my neck and splashed water on my face. The startlingly cool water had a minty taste, and I could smell fresh mint in the air. I looked around to see both mint and basil growing in large clumps near the fountain. I took another drink of water, wet my face, and put my cap back on. I then followed the direction toward which I had seen the boy lead Sal and Celeste.

I worked my way back through the ruins, passing through the arched hallways of the ancient structure, listening for Sal’s voice. I found myself in an area the boy had not yet shown to us. I was in the courtyard of a temple. At one end of the temple were the remains of a sculpture. Its body was charred, and its head and arms were missing. I got a sick feeling in my stomach. I approached the sculpture to see that is was, in fact, the sculpture of a woman. Was this all that was left of the Aphrodite? I looked upward and caught sight of the bow of the
Bacchus
. If the kaleidoscope’s coordinates were exact, then this was not the statue we hunted. Our statue would be east of here. I looked around to see a set of crumbled stairs leading downward into a mostly collapsed hallway that led underground-and east. I went to the stairwell. Someone had cleared the fallen rock. If I kneeled down, I could enter the ruin. That is, if I wanted to enter. Then I noticed one of the smaller golden colored Aesculapian snakes working its way over the rocks into the underground passage. The space looked tight and dark. The snake turned and looked toward me, pausing for several moments before it slithered into the darkness.

“Fantastic,” I muttered.

Someone had left a small white candle at the entrance. A fellow opium eater and chemist who lived on the Strand had given me a small box of his experimental sulphur timbers which I always carried. I struck up my nerve, lit the candle, and entered the underground passage.

My imagination had me going, and I expected the place to be squirming with snakes. To my luck, only the small, golden snake was moving on the ground before me. The place had suffered at the passage of the hands of time. Rubble was everywhere. The roots of trees overhead had grown down the hallway walls. Many of the walls had completely caved in. Yet I could still see some of the ancient beauty of the place. On one wall, I saw the faded colors of a still-striking painting of a goddess in an ocean setting. Where the soil had not encroached, small white tiles and mosaic patterns appeared on the floor. The passage was dark and winding. Small rooms, many entirely filled by earth, sat just off the hallway. One room, which had remained untouched by time, had a number of stone bathing tubs. I followed the hallway until it reached a “T”. I flashed the candle around before me and worried about getting lost. The flame’s light caught the glowing scales of the snake, which had turned left.

“I guess you’re leading,” I said, knowing just how crazy I sounded, and followed along.

Here the ruins were even more collapsed. In order to follow the serpent, I had to climb over a tall pile of rubble. I had just about made up my mind that I’d had enough risking my neck looking for an old piece of stone when I saw light ahead. Thinking the temple wall must be open to the outside, I went forward.

A golden hue illuminated the end of the hallway. The glow bobbed on the hallway wall, almost as if it were sunlight refracted by water. The temple snake kept a steady path toward the light.

I turned at the end of the hall and sucked in my breath in awe. The temple was not open to the outside light. Instead, a statue, shimmering brilliantly from the dusting of gold that covered it, filled the room with liquid light. The statue was celestial, but it was not the statue I sought. I immediately understood that I was in the temple room of the god Asclepius. The statue in gold was the god of healing.

Boasting a broad chest, curly hair, and draped robes, Asclepius was an imposing figure. He leaned against a staff around which two snakes had entwined. The golden dust on him gave the state a lifelike hue. At Asclepius’ feet, water poured from the open mouth of a marble serpent into a basin. The snake climbed up the statue, twisting around the god’s staff, until its head rested on the god’s shoulder.

I took off my hat and knelt before the statue. Given my upbringing, I was not a religious girl. And I had never before sensed the divine except at the edge of an opium high. In those moments, where I sometimes lingered too long, the wind of the otherworld had blown ever so lightly upon me. Standing there, however, in that ancient place, I felt… something. The forgotten god’s eyes, still outlined with faded paint, seemed to look down at me. And they seemed to pity.