"That thou didst give me once, O father, when thou didst send me to the Gateway to marry the foul priest," answered Memene. "That is neither forgotten nor forgiven thee."
"Thou art no more daughter of mine," Karnaon said between his set teeth. Then he, too, turned away and followed the others down the steep hill, walking heavily.
Slowly the nobles crossed the valley and the river and took their tidings to Analos at the Gateway.
At the top of the pathway to the first terrace, the high priest met them, escorted by the black-robed company that served the mighty altar of Hephaistos. When he saw that they brought no royal captives with them, and heard the tale of the defiance Minos had hurled at the ancient god, his anger rose and choked him so that he answered them nothing. He stood and heard them through, his hands clenched under his robe so that the nails of his fingers bit into his palms.
For a time he stood so. Then he rent his black robe from him, tearing it to shreds, and in his red paraphernalia of death ran up the terraces like a flame. In a room in his own house on the upper terrace he threw himself on the marble floor and writhed and rolled and tore at his black beard, gone clean mad with impotent rage. When one of his priests came to consult him, he leaped in frenzy, and slew the man with one stroke of a stone vase, then hid the body and went forth, somewhat calmed.
As he passed his threshold, a roaring smote upon his ears. From the lofty arched portal built against the side of the cliff gushed a tide of molten lava as wide as the river Ukranis. The fire-lake had risen until it overflowed the ledge and poured down through the spiral passage that led from the temple of death to the upper terrace.
Out from the carved portal flowed the fiery torrent, hissing and snapping. Right in its path lay the rows of dead Sardanians, awaiting the rites of Hephaistos, their quiet faces upturned and ghastly in the baleful radiance reflected down on them from the flaming hill-crown. One moment they lay there in their still lines, and then the seething flood passed over them and licked them up.
On it poured, and crept over the brink of the terrace, and down in a fearful cascade, setting fire to the forest on the side of the holy hill. The force of the torrent soon abated, and the lava lay as though some terrible serpent had crept forth from the deeps of the earth and stretched itself adown the terraces. For hours it glowed before it cooled into dross and ashes. The fire in the forest spread, until half the mountain was aflame, and the lower end of the valley presented a spectacle of unearthly splendor.
That flood of lava was a spurt of the very heart's blood of the valley. Even as it jetted from the side of the Gateway, halfway up the valley's rim three more of its volcanic guardians gave up their fiery ghosts, and the cold grip of the Antarctic took hold of their gaping throats.
Undaunted by the fury that raged on the Gateway to the Future, Analos would not desert his post on the upper terrace. All of the other priests he drove from him, bidding them abide below with the stricken people until such time as he should summon them to him again. He stayed alone with his god.