The Dancer from Atlantis

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The chance to talk privately came three days afterward, when Diores brought Oleg and Uldin back to Athens. They had been days of total fascination for Reid, a torrent of sights, sounds, smells, songs, stories, sudden explosive realizations of what this myth or that line of poetry really signified. And the nights—by tacit agreement, he and Erissa put no word about their fate into their whisperings at night. For the time being, anxiety, culture shock, even homesickness were largely anesthetized in him.

The Russian and the Hun had been still better off. Oleg bubbled about the chances he saw to make innovations, especially in shipbuilding and metallurgy, and thus to make a fortune. In his dour fashion. Uldin registered enthusiasms of his own. Attica held an abundance of swift, spirited horses at the right age for breaking to the saddle and of young men interested in experimenting with cavalry. Give him a few years, he said, and he’d have a troop that nothing could stand against when they rode off a-conquering.

This was related in the hall before Aegeus, Theseus, Diores, and the leading guardsmen.

Reid cleared his throat. “You suppose we can never return to, our countries, don’t you?” he said.

“How can we?” Uldin retorted.

“It must be talked over.” Reid braced himself “My lord king, we four have much to decide between us, not least how we can try to show you our gratitude. It won’t be easy to reach agreement, as unlike as I fear it would be impossible in the hustle and bustle of this establishment. You won’t think ill of us, will you, my lord, if we go off alone?”

Aegeus hesitated. Theseus frowned. Diores smiled and said smoothly, “Zeus thunder me, no! Tell you what I’ll do. Tomorrow I’ll have a wagon ready, nice comfortable seats, a stock o’ food and drink, and a trusty warrior to drive her wherever you like.” He lifted his palm. “No, don’t deny me, friends. I insist. Nothing’s too good for shipmates o’ mine. Wouldn’t be sensible to leave with a good-looking woman and just two o’ you who can handle a blade.”

And that, Reid thought grimly, was that. They would never be allowed to talk in private.

But when he told Erissa, she, was undismayed for some reason.

The fall weather continued pleasant, crisp air, sunshine picking out the gold of summer-dried grass and the hues of such leaves as had started faintly to turn. The wagon, mule-drawn, was indeed easy to ride in. The driver was a big young man named Peneleos, who addressed his passengers courteously though his glance upon them was ice-blue. Reid felt sure that, besides muscles, he had been chosen for especially keen ears and a knowledge of Keftiu.

“Where to?” he asked as they rumbled from the palace.

“A quiet spot,” Erissa said before anybody else could speak, “A place to rest alone.”

“M-m, the Grove of Periboea? We can get there about when you’ll want your midday bread. if you’re a votaress of Her, my lady, as I’ve been told, you’ll know what we should do so the nymph won’t mind.”

“Yes. Marvelous.” Erissa turned to Oleg. “Tell me about Diores’ farm. About everything! I’ve been penned. No complaint against the most gracious queen, of course. Achaean ways are not Cretan?’

She has a scheme, Reid realized. His pulse picked up.

Keeping the conversation neutral was no problem. They had a near infinity of memories to trade, from their homes as well as from here. But even had the case been different, Reid knew Erissa would have managed. She wasn’t coquettish; she drew Oleg, Uldin, and Peneleos out by asking intelligent questions and making comments that, sparked replies. (“if your ships, Oleg, are so much sturdier than ours that the ... Norsemen, did you say? ... actually cross the River Ocean—is that because you’ve harder wood, or iron for nails and braces, or what?”) Then she listened to the reply, leaning close. It was impossible to be unaware: of her sculptured features, sea-changeable eyes, lips slightly parted over white teeth, slim throat, and of how the light burnished her hair and the wind pulled her Achaean gown tight around breasts and waist.

She knows men, Reid thought. How she knows them!

The sacred grove was a stand of laurel trees surrounding a small meadow. In the center lay a huge boulder whose shape, vaguely suggestive of a yoni, must account for the demigoddess Periboea. To one side stretched an olive orchard, on the other a barley field, both harvested and deserted. In the background Mount Hymettus dreamed beneath the sun. The trees broke the wind in a lullaby rustle, the sere grass was thick and warm. Here dwelt peace.

Erissa knelt, said a prayer, divided a loaf of bread and laid a portion on the boulder for the nymph to give her birds. Rising, she said, “We are welcome. Bring our food and wine from the wagon. And Peneleos, won’t you remove that helmet and breastplate? We can see anybody coming miles away; and it’s not meet to carry weapons before a female deity”

“I beg her forgiveness,” the guardsmen said. He was less chagrined than he was glad to take off his burden and relax. They enjoyed a frugal, friendly lunch.

“Well, we were going to talk over our plans,” Uldin said afterward.

“Not yet,” Erissa answered. “I’ve had a better idea. The nymph is well disposed toward us. If we lie down and sleep awhile, she may send us a dream for guidance.”

Peneleos shifted about where he sat. “I’m not sleepy,” he said. “Besides, my duty—”

“Of course. Yet you also have a duty to learn for your king what you can of these strange matters. True?”

“M-m-m yes.”

“It may be that she will favor you above us, this being your country and not ours. Surely she’ll be pleased if you show her the respect of inviting her counsel. Come:’ Erissa took his hand. He rose to her gentle tugging. “Over here. On the sunlit side of the rock. Sit down, lean back, feel her warmth. And now—” She drew from her bosom a small bronze mirror. “Now look into this token of the Goddess, Who is the Mother of nymphs."

She knelt before him. He stared bemusedly at her and the shining disk and back. “No,” she murmured. “The mirror only, Peneleos, wherein you will see that which She wills.” She turned it slowly.

Good Lord! thought Reid. He drew Oleg and Uldin away, behind the big stone.

“What’s she doing?” the Russian inquired uneasily. “Hsh: Reid whispered. “Sit. Be quiet. This is a holy thing.”

“A heathen thing, I fear.” Oleg crossed himself. But he and the Hun obeyed.

Sunlight poured through murmurous leaves. The sweet smell of dried grass lifted like smoke to meet it. Bees hummed among briar roses. Erissa crooned.

When she came around the boulder, none of her morning’s cheerfulness was left. She had laid that aside. Her look was at once grave and exalted. The white streak in her hair stood forth against its darkness like a crown.

Reid got to his feet. “You’ve done it?” he asked.

She nodded. “He will not awaken before I command. Afterward he will think he drowsed off with the rest of us and had whatever dream I will have related to him.” She gave the American a close regard. “I did not know you knew of the Sleep.”

“What witchcraft is this?” Oleg rasped.

Hypnotism, Reid named it to himself. Except that she has more skill in it than any therapist I ever heard of in my own era. Well, I suppose that’s a matter of personality.

“It is the Sleep,” Erissa said, “that I lay on the sick when it can ease their pain and on the haunted to drive their nightmares out of them. It does not always come when I wish. But Peneleos is a simple fellow and I spent the trip here putting him at ease.”

Uldin nodded. “I’ve watched shamans do what you did,” he remarked. “Have no fears, Oleg. Though I never awaited meeting a she-shaman.”

“Now let us speak,” Erissa said.

Her sternness brought home to Reid like a sword thrust that she was not really the frightened castaway, yearning exile, ardent and wistful mistress he had imagined he knew. Those were waves on a deep sea. She had indeed become a stranger to the girl who remembered him—a slave who won free, a wanderer who stayed alive among savages, a queen in the strong household she herself had brought to being, a healer, witch, priestess and prophetess.

Suddenly he had an awesome feeling that her triune Goddess had in all truth entered this place and possessed her.

“What is the doom of Atlantis?” she went on.

Reid stooped and poured himself a cup of wine to help him swallow his dread. “You don’t recall?” he mumbled.

“Not the end. The months before, yours and mine, on the holy island and in Knossos, those are unforgotten. But I will not speak of what I now know will be for you even as it was for me. That is too sacred.

“I will say this: I have questioned out what year this is, and put together such numbers as the years since the present Minos ascended his throne or since the war between Crete and Athens. From these I have reckoned that we are four-and-twenty years from that day when I am borne out of Rhodes to Egypt. You will soon depart hence, Duncan.”

Oleg’s ruddiness had paled. Uldin had retreated into stolidity.

Reid gulped the sharp red wine. He didn’t look at Erissa; his gaze took refuge on Mount Hymettus above the treetops. “What is the last you clearly remember?” he asked.

“We went to Knossos in spring, we sisters of the rite. I danced with the bulls.” Her measured, impersonal tone softened. “Afterward you came, and we—But Theseus was already there, and others I cannot remember well. Maybe I was too happy to care. Our happiness does live on within me.” Quieter yet: “It will live as long as I do, and I will take it home with me to the Goddess.”

Again she was the wise-woman in council: “We need a clearer foreknowledge than my clouded recollections of the end, or the tales about it that I gathered later, can give us. What have you to. tell?”

Reid gripped the cup till his fingers hurt. “Your Atlantis,” he said, “is that not a volcanic island about sixty miles north of Crete?”

“Yes. I believe the smoke rising from the mountain, as it often does, brought about the name ‘Land of the Pillar.’ Atlantis is the seat of the Ariadne, who reigns over rites and votaries throughout the realm even as the Minos reigns over worldly affairs.”

Ariadne? Not a name, as myth was to make it, but a title: “Most Sacred One.”

“I know Atlantis will sink in fire, ash, storm, and destruction,” Erissa said.

“Then you know everything I do, or nearly,” Reid answered in wretchedness. “My age had nothing but shards. It happened too long ago.”

He had read a few popular accounts of the theorizing and excavating that had begun in earnest in his own day. A cluster of islands, Thera and its still tinier companions, the Santorini group, had looked insignificant except for being remnants left by an eruption that once dwarfed Krakatoa. But lately several scientists—yes, Anghelos Galanopoulos in the lead—had started wondering. If you reconstructed the single original island, you got “a picture oddly suggestive of the capital of Atlantis as described by Plato; and ancient walls were known to be buried under the lava and cinders. That settlement might be better preserved than Pompeii, what parts had not vanished in the catastrophe.

To be sure, Plato could simply have been embellishing his discourses in the Timaios and the Kritias with a fiction. He had put his lost continent in midocean, impossibly big and impossibly far back if it was to have fought Athens. Yet there was some reason to believe he drew on a tradition, that half: memory of the Minoan empire which flickered through classical legend.

Assume his figures were in error. He claimed to derive the story from Solon, who had it from an Egyptian priest, who said he drew on records in another, older language. Translating from Egyptian to Greek numerals, you could easily get numbers above one hundred wrong by a factor of ten; and a timespan counted in months could be garbled into the same amount of years.

Plato was logically forced to move his Atlantis beyond the Pillars of Hercules. The Mediterranean didn’t have room for it. But take away the obviously invented hinterland. Shrink the city plan by one order of magnitude. The outline became not too different from that of Santorini. Change years to months. The date of Atlantis’ death shifted to between 1500 and 1300 B.C.

And this bestrode the 1400 B.C.—give or take a few decades—that archeologists assigned to the destruction of Knossos, the fall of the Thalassocracy.

Reid thought: I cannot tell her that I found what I read interesting, but not interesting enough to make me go there or even to read further.

“What are you talking about?” Uldin barked.

“We know the island will founder,” Reid told him. “That will be the most terrible thing ever to happen in this part of the world. A mountain will burst, stones and ashes rain from heaven, the darkness spread as far as Egypt The waves that are raised will sink the Cretan fleet; and Crete has no other defenses. Earthquakes will shake its cities apart. The Achaeans will be free to enter as conquerors?’

They pondered it, there in the curious peace of the sanctuary. Wind lulled, bees buzzed. Finally Oleg, eyes almost hidden beneath contracted yellow brows, asked, “Why won’t the Achaean ships be sunk too?”

“They’re further off,” Uldin guessed—

“No,” Erissa said. “Over the years I heard accounts. Vessels were swamped, flung ashore and smashed, and coasts flooded beneath a wall of water, along the whole Peloponnesus and the west coast of Asia. Not the, Athenian fleet, though. It was at sea and suffered little. Theseus boasted to the end of his life how Poseidon had fought for him.”

Reid nodded. He knew something about tsunamis. “The water rose beneath the hulls, but bore them while it did,” he said. “A wave like that is actually quite gentle at sea. imagine the Cretans were in harbor, or near the shores they were supposed to defend. Caught on the incoming billow, they were borne to land.”

“Like being in heavy surf.” Oleg shivered beneath the sun.

“A thousand times worse,” Reid said.

“When is this to happen?” Uldin asked.

“Early next year,” Erissa told him.

“She means in the springtime,” Reid explained, since Russia would use a different calendar from hers and the Huns, perhaps, none.

“Well,” Oleg said after a silence. “Well.”

He lumbered to the woman and awkwardly patted her shoulder. “I’m sorry for your folk,” he said. “Can nothing be done?”

“Who can stay the demons?” Uldin responded. Erissa was staring past them all.

“The Powers have been kind to us,” the Hun continued. “Here we are on the side that’ll win.”

“No!” flared Erissa. Fists clenched, she brought her eyes back to the men; the gaze burned. “It will not be. We can warn the Minos and the Ariadne. Let Atlantis and the coastal cities on Crete be evacuated. Let the fleet stand out to sea. And ... contrive to keep the cursed Athenian ships home. Then the realm will live.”

“Who’ll believe us?” Reid breathed.

“Can what is foredoomed be changed?” Oleg asked as softly and shakenly. His fingers flew, tracing crosses.

Uldin hunched his shoulders. “Should it be?” he demanded.

“What?” Reid asked in shock.

“What’s wrong with the Achaeans winning?” Uldin said. “They’re a healthy folk. And the Powers favor them. Who but a madman would fight against that?”

“Hold on,” Oleg said, deep in his throat. “You speak what could be dangerous.”

Erissa said, unperturbed, like embodied destiny, “We must try. We will try. I know:’ To Reid: “Before long, you will know too.”

“Anyhow,” the architect added, “Atlantis holds our only chance of ever getting home.”