“You’re the Oracle of Delphi. How can you not know? And if you don’t know, why should I do this?”
“It is important. Not just Greece, but the entire world lies in the balance.”
“What is this important sphere?”
“It is a kind of map.”
“Of?” he asked once more.
“I don’t know. But someone else will.”
“Who?”
The Oracle’s eyes lost their focus as she looked inward. “Someone who is not yet alive, but is alive. One who is of this world, but not of this world. Another warrior, like you, but not like you.”
“Riddles.” Leonidas pulled off his helmet, revealing chiseled features and a lined face. White hair spilled out, tied in a ponytail that touched the back of his neck.
“No, the commands of the gods. Will you do it?”
“You promise me glory and honor and death in battle.” He smiled, highlighting a scar on his left cheek. “What Spartan could refuse such an offer? I will do it.”
CHAPTER 1
A little old lady was walking across a flat stony plain in Peru, an umbrella held in one hand to protect her from the sun, the other carrying a folding canvas seat. She had a faded leather backpack looped over one shoulder. Her skin was tanned and leathery, etched with lines from many years in the harsh sun.
Cresting a small hill in the middle of the plain, Dr. Leni Reizer opened the stool and sat down, giving a sigh of relief as she did so. She’d lived in the valley of the Nazca for over fifty years and the combination of heat, sun, dryness and age was beginning to wear on her.
She was in the exact center of a high plain between the Inca and Nazca valleys. The plain was almost fifty miles long and several miles in width. To the east, the high peaks of the Andes were visible, white capped and wreathed with clouds. The ground was hard packed, littered with small stones.
She had walked every foot of that plain and knew every stone, and more importantly, every line cut into the surface of the plain where there were no stones. She was seated in the midst of what some called the world’s largest work of art. For its size, covering almost five hundred square miles, it was also the least visible work of art as the complex patterns cut into the surface of the plain could only be truly appreciated with an aerial view, an enigma given that the lines had been cut well before the birth of Christ.
Reizer knew all the designs by heart. She came to this spot, a small knoll where she had first realized the magnitude of the complex so many years earlier, for solitude. Several lines originated on the knoll, radiating outward at various lengths. Also, what she called the master line, terminated here. The master began with a huge wedge cut into the plain five miles due south of her position. The wedge was almost a mile long, and at the small end a line extended which stretched five miles to this location.
The few tourists who came to the site, when they found out vehicles were forbidden to enter the plain, went to the nearest large town, Ica, and took the small plane tour, looking down on the site. The tour plane only flew once a week as this site was very remote and difficult to get to. She’d camped for days in the middle of the complex and not seen another human being.
The Nazca lines had first been noted in the 1930s when planes surveying for water had spotted them. A person walking on the ground might note a line when they crossed it, the ever-present small stones removed, a gouge cut in the hard earth, but the magnitude of the lines and the designs many of them formed would escape the person on the ground. The lines and geoglyphs were well preserved given the dryness of the climate, the lack of rainfall — less than twenty minutes a year- and the remoteness of the site.
There were over three hundred designs cut into the plain, and almost as many theories about why they were built and by whom. In 1969 Erich Von Daniken had proposed that they were ancient runways for extraterrestrials, but Reizer had never heard of a monkey shaped runway. There were indeed quite a few large wedge-shaped patterns besides the master, some more than twenty-five hundred feet long with lines extending from them for over five miles, but the lines dwindled to less than a foot in width, hardly space for any decent sized craft to land upon. And even the straight lines went over knolls such as this one, or into small gulleys, which precluded a level landing field if they were just markers.
Others had postulated that the lines were astronomical designs, keyed to various stars. But a close examination of the designs, even regressing star-fields to the time they were supposed to have been built, found that less than twenty percent had any connection to stars, certainly not a significant number, well within the range of statistical chance. Reizer had even projected out all the lines to see if they lined up with specific peaks in the mountains that surrounded the plain, but had had little success. In her younger days she had traveled to the few peaks that she had come up with but found nothing of significance on them.
Some said the lines were the work of an ancient cult, but where had the people who made up the cult come from? Reizer had questioned. Pottery from the Nazcas and other people who had lived in the area held designs, but nothing similar to the Nazca lines. Wouldn’t it have made sense that there would be similarities? She had argued.
Another thing she took issue with was the dating of the lines. The best guesses had come from radiocarbon dating of ceramic and wood remains in the area. But that simply proved the people who used those artifacts lived or passed across the plain at that time, not that those people made the lines. She felt that would be like dropping her backpack on the plain and a thousand years from now someone radiocarbon dating it and announcing that the lines were made in the twentieth century.
Reizer felt the lines were much older than anyone realized. And she had always believed that their existence was the result of something no one had ever considered. Given the events of the last several months, with the proof of the reality of Atlantis and the existence of an ancient enemy, the Shadow, that attacked the world through gates, she had come to believe that the lines were somehow connected to these recent revelations. How, though, she wasn’t quite sure. She had come here today to ponder possibilities.
She spent most of the day in quiet contemplation, occasionally pulling out a sketchbook and jotting down thoughts as they occurred to her. She shifted the umbrella to keep in the shade as the sun arced overhead. Having emigrated from post-World War II Germany, she still savored the quiet and solitude of the plain.
As dusk approached, she saw a dust cloud to the west, near the edge of the plain. She reached into her backpack and pulled out a small set of binoculars and brought them to her eyes. Twisting the focus, she zoomed in on the solitary figure walking across the plain toward her, the truck that had brought him already heading back to the village.
He wore new khakis, she could still make out the store creases, and of all things a pith helmet. She had a good idea who he was — she’d had correspondence from an Englishman named Davon several times in the past year. She had always thought from what he wrote that he was, as the English would say, a bit daft. After recent events, though, she was viewing his theories in a different light. His last fax, yesterday, had indicated he was en route to Peru.
“Hello!” he called out when he came within fifty feet, his voice carried by the slight breeze.
Reizer simply waited. Years walking these plains had given her immeasurable patience. The young man was perspiring when he finally arrived even though the sun was almost down and it was at least ten degrees cooler in the past hour.
“Doctor Reizer, I presume?”
Reizer shifted her umbrella, keeping her face in the shadow. “You expected someone else?”