I

Theodorus stands at the end of a pier in front of the calm, clear blue sky and its join with the grey, still surface of the Black Sea. A clear sun bakes the revellers and fishermen, the wild children frolicking unwatched in the shallows beneath the sandstone sea wall. The iron bell swinging from the pale church tower above the bay rings, a dull echo drifting into the low roar of the waves into the jagged rocks. A thick smell of salt and seaweed fills Theodorus’s nostrils. He picks out the giggling screams of the children below and behind him, and the barked commands of the harbour-master in his wooden palisade by the dock.

He sees the lighthouse. It stands upon a black crag protruding squint from the sea, like the handle of an impaling spear. It is narrow and the colour of the sands that stick to the damp feet of the young and feckless. There is a single brazier that hangs from the ceiling at its top, a blazing pyre invisible in the midday sunshine. In the blinding light, there are thin black silhouettes distorted by the flames, twisted and skeletal shadows gesticulating, waving their impossibly narrow arms. Their screaming voices are lost in the tumult of the endless ocean, and the clamour of city life. Nobody saw them except Theodorus. Hearing joy and seeing shrill, blind panic.

Then he saw the larger shadow below the rocking surface of the sea. Like an independent wave at an angle shielded from the scorching sun, darker, concealed even. As Theodorus watched the wave approach the lighthouse crag, he saw how it darkened, how it became less opaque as it shifted upwards. Up and out of the ocean, rumbling as it rose. The waves beneath Theodorus shrank back from the rocks at the base of the seawall below. The sandstone he stood upon began to vibrate, a gentle throb as if a caravan of carriages were passing by. The stench of the sea grew the rot of dying life and the choking sourness.

The shadow beneath the water grew darker and grew larger, taking form with mighty and endless spiked shoulder blades and the uneven, dense mass where a neck may grow. He felt the world grow cold around him, even as his skin burned in the sun. He felt sound drown out and away, even as the ocean roared into life. He turned towards the harbour-master and shrieked.

‘Sound the alarm! Alarm!’

The roaring waves and screaming children deafened the harbour master’s gnarled ears. He barked at the fishing boats even as the sea level began to drop inches at a time.

Theodorus turned back to the lighthouse, just as it was consumed by the rising spectre from the ocean, that mass of wet flesh and dark, hard shell, shrouded in water that swallowed the crag whole. Through it, he made out a beast he was not built to ever see.

II

The monstrosity surging out of the rising waves dwarfed the collapsing lighthouse. It was like the ocean’s contents itself. Bulbous, pulpy, translucent and swollen with soft, bulging tissue. But it moved win the humanoid shape of a marionette, loosely hanging head, shoulders endless arms and a torso curving outwards into might be hips. Its skin was a suit of rough, hard scales sharper than the rocks. Theodorus saw gills, enormous gills the size of galleys. He saw eyes on its fleshy head that were like an oyster’s pearl by night. He saw a mess of tentacles that formed an overlong beard hanging from what might its jaws. It was behind displaced, floating water half a mile to sea but it rose like a living mountain from the wet depths, so he saw every pore.

            Then it dove, like the risen ocean waves around it. It turned downwards and in the blinking of an eye dived into the sea surface once more. The seawater fell and struck the standing surface like a thunderclap. The screams around Theodorus were no longer children playing, but the merchants, traders and fishermen. They all pointed out into the bay at the jagged remnants of the destroyed lighthouse. The ocean waves swelled and rose and rallied and charged the seawall. Theodorus stood frozen, staring.

The fishermen shouted. The harbour-master waved them all from the water, eyes bulging. Some of the sailors reached the harbour walls or the piers and clambered for the dry surfaces. The wild children ran for the crevices and the outcrops amongst the beach rocks. The tradesmen and the traders sprinted into the city, away from the docks.

One huge green wave almost as tall as the city’s double walls, approached Theodorus. He looked up at its slow, groaning advance. Saw in its depths the shapes of broken masonry and the shining glint of the stolen lighthouse brazier. Somebody finally rang the bells. They sounded like faint chimes against the thunderous roar of the wave.

In its face, Theodorus looked for something that might be God. Not a face, not eyes like the beast had worn, but something of beauty. Only the sea looked back. He closed his eyes tight, and gripped the edge of the seawall tightly.

The wave struck the sea wall and rocked its foundations. Sandstone was no longer beneath Theodorus’s soles. He was weightless. He entered the water at some strange angle, hands first. His senses muffled and his lungs itching for breath. He tumbled under the water’s surface, dragged through currents like they were pulled by horses. Deeper and darker, until he could not keep his eyes open. He kept his mouth closed, held his little ragged breath in his chest. Floating in some strange otherworld, without sun or air or light. He opened his eyes slowly, gradually, and saw the darkest blues and greens. He saw dark smudges. He saw the shadow again. It drove the remaining air from his chest, and he began to drown.

III

The whole world and universe and everything Theodorus knew was crammed into his small chest, choking the life from his heart and starving his head. He thrashed until his arms and legs grew too weary to move. He screamed and drove a cluster of thick bubbles out into the near-black water. He saw growing, blinding white light.

In the warbling shapes around his hearing, Theodorus began to detect noises. A bellowing voice. Water gurgling through stones. Hammering hooves on cobbles. Then he began to feel something hard, solid, the world returned to him. He felt himself dragged across rough shoals and on to the coarse, flat rock surface of a harbour ramp. He lay a moment, still. Tussled.

            The world erupted out of chest, and he vomited seawater on to the ramp. He choked and coughed and spewed it out. A firm, meaty hand gripped his shoulder, and another pounded his back. He expelled the last of the swallowed water and collapsed on to his side. He was in the fisheries harbour, beneath the broken, splintered remnants of the harbour master’s palisade. The man himself loomed over Theodorus, eyes unfocused and stance unsteady. He was soaked from head to toe, dripping with salty water. Around him, the serfs of the city dragged sailors and fishermen and merchants and children from the lapping waves. He turned towards the city.

            Webs of seaweed hung from the steepled red roofs of the buildings high above the seawall. The white stone of their walls was festooned with shells and sand and loose rock, chipped away and cracked. The stained-glass windows of the nearest church above the harbour were shattered, hollow cavities with pure darkness inside. Theodorus rolled over, towards the harbour itself. Fishing boats floated capsized, their ribbed hulls facing the sun. One lay like Theodorus did, on its side on a stone ramp.

            A drizzle began to fall, ocean spray that dropped from some great heigh like wet flecks of salt. They stung Theodorus’s face and eyes. The rescuers around him raised their hands over their faces, cried out warnings. A city guardsman rode by on a white steed, protected from the downpour by his layers of metal armour. Other sentries and men-at-arms and cataphracts began to appear in small groups, pushing through the crowded streets at the limits to the seafront.

            ‘The Seljuks,’ the harbour-master was mumbling. ‘They destroyed the tower.’

            ‘No,’ Theodorus said. His voice was hoarse and ragged, as if he had aged a lifetime.

            ‘What was it then?’ a fisherman asked. ‘Did you see?’

            ‘It was a monster. A vast monster, a living mountain. It rose from the sea.’

            The harbour-master shot him a fierce glare and glowered, then turned away.

            ‘Mad with it,’ he said. ‘The damn Seljuks have drowned any sense in that boy.’

            The others glanced at Theodorus darkly, shaking their heads. He turned over and looked out to sea, past the ruins of the lighthouse. The empty ocean stretched endlessly beyond.