The Dancer from Atlantis

XIV

“Yes, your friends are doing fine,” Diores said. “They send their regards.”

Reid tried not to glower at him. They sat alone in an off-side room of the temple, to which the American had drawn the Athenian after the latter’s long private interview with Lydra. Diores’ smile continued bland; he lounged back at ease on the stone bench. “Just what are they doing?” Reid asked.

“Well, Uldin’s breaking horses and training men for his cavalry. Or aims to. it’s slow, scarcely begun, among other reasons because he’s got only the one-saddle—hasn’t found a leatherworker who can make ‘em right, he says. Oleg ... tun ... shipbuilding, like I hear tell you are. I’ll be mighty interested to see what you’ve started.”

“I’m afraid that’s forbidden,” Reid answered. “State secret.”

It wasn’t, but he meant to contact the governor and have the declaration made immediately. Why give the enemy a break? And Theseus was the enemy, who would pull down Erissa’s sunny cosmos unless somehow history could be amended.

No, not even that. Wouldn’t the legends and the archeology be the same, three or four thousand years hence, if Minoan Crete lived a little longer? Not much longer; the lifetime of a girl; was that unreasonable to ask of the gods?

“Why are, you here?” he demanded. “And” a picked crew?’ They were no ordinary sailors, he’d heard, but warriors of the royal household, who kept to themselves and scarcely spoke to the Atlanteans.

“As to that last,” Diores drawled, “you don’t get common seamen who’ll travel in winter. Too risky?’ As if to bear him out, wind hooted and rain plashed beyond the richly tapestried walls. “Oleg says he can build a year-round ship, but meanwhile we use what we’ve got, right?”

“You haven’t told me what brought you!’

“Can’t, either. Sorry, mate. I carry a confidential message. You’ll quite likely see me here a few times more. I will say this. Your oracle ordered Athens and Knossos should pull closer together. Fine. But how? What kind of alliance and divvy-up? Why should the Minos want to raise us from vassalage? What trouble could the envy of others cause? That sort of question. It’s got to be explored; and statecraft don’t work when it’s put right out in public view; and seeing as how Theseus has a friend in the Ariadne, wouldn’t you agree she’s the logical person to begin talking with? Let’s say they’re feeling each other out.”

Diores snickered. “She’s not too long in the tooth for a man to feel,” he went on. “About that, I hear you’re running around with a right tasty morsel yourself”

Reid bridled. “Erissa’s a bull-dancer.”

“Same’s your lady love of the same name used to be, hm? Makes me think there’s something special here somewhere. By the way, you haven’t, asked me about her.”

Reid wondered: Was I afraid to? Aloud: “Well?”

“She’s not doing badly either. Moped a lot at first, but lately—Remember Peneleos?” Diores nudged Reid and winked. “Het been giving her what she needs. You don’t mind, do you?”

“No,” Reid said faintly.

Old Erissa had been through many hands. It was the maiden whom he hoped to save.

“No,” Lydra said, “I will not tell you what passes between Theseus and me. You’re presumptuous to ask.”

“But he’s part of the danger!” Reid protested.

She looked down at him from her elevated throne. Behind her lean body and stern countenance, the Griffin Judge awaited the dead. “How do you know?”

“B-b-by my foreknowledge.”

“What then of the oracle commanding alliance?” Her tone cracked like a blow across his ears. “Or did you lie about that?”

Lamps flickered in a cold space that besides they two held only shadows. But guards waited beyond the door. They were unarmed; no weapons might be brought to the sacred isle. However, four strong men could quickly make a prisoner of Duncan Reid.

“Criminals go to the quarries on Crete,” Lydra said. “They do not live long. Nor do they wish to.”

“I did not—my lady, I—I asked for this audience before Diores leaves b-b-because I suspect him and his master—”

“On what grounds? Aegeus rebelled but is now a dotard. Theseus slew his Cretan-raised cousins but then turned into a dutiful prince. He will become the same kind of king.”

“I listened—to what they, the Achaeans, what they were saying—”

“Oh, yes. They grumble, they bluster, no doubt a few of them plot, but to what end? Theseus can be expected to keep a rein on them, the more so if he may hope to win a higher place in the Thalassocracy for himself and his realm.” Lydia stabbed a finger at Reid. “Are you trying to sow discord, outlander? Whom do you serve?”

He thought: I have to tell her the truth, whatever the risk. Therels no choice left.

“My lady,” he said slowly, “I never lied to you, but I did hold back certain matters. Please remember, I’m a complete stranger here. I had to find out what the situation is, the rights and wrongs, the ins and outs. Including whether you would believe the whole story. I don’t yet know that. But will you listen?”

She nodded.

“The mason I can prophesy,” he said, “is that I come from the future.”

“The what?” She frowned, trying to understand. The Keftiu language didn’t lend itself well to such a concept.

But she caught the idea faster than he had hoped. And apart from signing herself and kissing her talisman, she was curiously little shaken. He wondered if she, living in a world of myth and mystery, looked on this as only another miracle.

“Yes,” she murmured, “that explains a great deal?’

And later: “Knossos will indeed fall? The Thalassocracy will be less than a legend?’ She turned about and stared long at the portrait of the Judge. “Well,” she said low, “all things are mortal?’

Reid went on, describing what he could of the basic problem. His chief omission was the fact that the two Erissas were identical. He feared the possible consequences to the girl. It seemed merely needful to be vague about the date from which the woman came. The name was not uncommon and Lydra was being given a monstrous lot else to think about. He also skipped the tradition that she, traitress to the Minos, would herself be betrayed. It looked too insulting, thus too dangerous.

“What you tell me,” ahe said, flat-voiced, “is that the gods, decree Theseus shall overthrow the sea empire.”

“No, my lady. The single thing I’m certain of is that the volcano will wipe out Atlantis within months, the. Cretans will be conquered, and a story will tell how a Theseus killed a monster in Knossos. The facts need not bang together very closely. The tale could be quite false. I know already it’s wrong in several ways at least. No one Minotaur ever existed, half human and half brute, just a series of sacrificial bulls. The youths and maidens from Athens are not slain but well treated. Ariadne is not the kingh daughter. The Labyrinth is not a maze imprisoning the Minotaur, simply the chief palace of your priest-king, the House of the Double Ax. I could go on. But you must understand my meaning. Why should the Thalassocracy not survive the foundering of this island, perhaps for many generations?”

“If its holy of holies is destroyed by divine will, then the wrath of the gods is upon the people of the Minos,” Lydra said quietly.

“They could lose heart on that account,” Reid agreed. “But I swear, my lady, the causes will be as natural as ... as a rock happening to fall on a man’s head.”

“Is that man not fated to die by that rock?”

Reid warned himself: You’re dealing with an alien world-view. Don’t stop to argue.

He said, “We can’t be sure what’s ordained for Crete. Asterion wills men to strive bravely to the end. Evacuating your folk to safety can be our way of striving.”

Lydra sat still; she might have been carved from the same marble as her throne, and in the dull uneasy light she had scarcely more color.

“The mainlanders could use the chance to seize your cities,” Reid plodded on. “If they do, they might regret it when the destruction comes. But we ought to plan against that event too. Everything, both the old story I read and what I have seen and heard in this age, everything makes me doubt Theseus.” He paused. “And that’s why I asked what message he has sent you, my lady:”

Lydra remained moveless, expressionless. Reid had started wondering if something was wrong with her when she said: “I’m sworn to secrecy. The Ariadne cannot violate her oath. However, you may have guessed that he is ... interested in the idea of closer relationships with the Labyrinth ... and would naturally see if I might be persuaded to help.”

“Diores told me that much, my lady. Uh, uh, could you keep him in play? Prolong negotiations, immobilize him till the crisis is past?”

“You have been heard, Duncan. But the Ariadne must decide. I will not receive you soon again.”

And suddenly, strangely, Lydra’s shoulders bowed. She passed a hand across her eyes and whispered, “It is no easy thing being the Ariadne. I thought .. I believed, when the vision came to me in that hallowed place ... I believed priestesshood would be unending happiness and surely the high priestess lived in the eternal radiance of Asterion. Instead—endless rites, endlessly the same—drab squabbles and intrigues—whisker-chinned crones who abide and abide, while the maidens come and serve and go home to be brides—” She straightened. “Enough. You are dismissed. Speak no word of what has passed between us.”

They sought their cove on another day. “Let’s swim,” Erissa said and was unclad and in the water before he could answer. Her hair floated black on its clarity, her limbs white below. “Nyah, afraid of cold?” she shouted, and splashed at him.

What the hell, he decided, and joined her. The water was in truth chilly. He churned it to keep warm. Erissa dove, grabbed his ankle and pulled him under. It ended in a laughing, gasping wrestling match.

When they went ashore the breeze made them shiver again. “I know a cure for this,” Erissa said, and came into his embrace. They lay down on a blanket. Presently she grinned. “You’ve stronger medicine in mind, haven’t you?”

“I, I can’t help it. 0 gods, but you’re beautiful!”

She said, gravely and trustingly, “You can have me whenever you want, Duncan.”

He thought: I’m forty and she’s seventeen. I’m American and she’s Minoan. I’m of the Atomic Age and she’s of the Bronze Age. I’m married, I have children, and she’s a virgin. I’m an old idiot and she’s the springtime that never was in my life before she came.

“That wouldn’t be good for you, would it?” he managed to ask.

“What better?” She pressed against him.

“No, hold off, seriously, you’d be in trouble, wouldn’t you?”

“Well—I am half consecrated while I’m here as a dancer—But I don’t care, I don’t care!”

“I do. I must. We’d better put our clothes on.”

He thought: We have to survive. Until what? Until we know if her country will. Afterward—if it does, will I stay here? If it doesn’t, will I bring her home with me? Can I do either? May I?

His tunic and her skirt resumed, they sat back down. She, snuggled. Her fingers ruffled his beard. “You’re always sorrowful, down underneath, aren’t you?” she asked.

“I have some knowledge of what is to be,” he replied, though he dared not get specific, “and it does hurt.”

“Poor darling god! I do think you’re a god, even if you won’t admit it. Must you live every unhappiness twice? Why not every happiness, then? Look, the sky’s blue and the water’s green and the sand’s soaked full of sunshine and here’s a beaker of wine „ no, let me hold it to your lips, I want your arm around my waist and your other hand right here—”

* * *

A good many compromises had had to be made as work progressed on the ship, some with Keftiu prejudices and requirements, some with the limitations of local technology, some with aspects of hydrodynamics that Reid discovered he had not known about. The end result was smaller, less handy, and less conspicuously extratemporal than he had hoped.

However, it was a considerable achievement. About eighty feet long, the slender hull was built outward and upward from a great dugout. Down the center ran a raised and bulwarked deck, beneath which passed thwarts for the rowers. The ram was a beak projecting at the waterline, bronze-sheathed, backed by heavy timbers. The twenty oars on either side were interrupted at the middle by lee-boards which had turned out to be more practical, on the whole, than a false keel or centerboard. Steering was by a true rudder. Two masts bore fore-and-aft rigs. Because. Sarpedon insisted—probably rightly, in view of the low free-board, the scanty ballasting, and the impacts sustained in battle—that they be readily unstepped, the masts were short. Reid gained sail area by using gaffs, and he had available both a genoa jib and a spinnaker; but the Minoan cloth, loosely woven, inclined to stretch and sag and absorb water, did not give the performance of canvas or dacron.

Thus the handling characteristics turned out so odd to him that his crew caught the knack about as fast as he did. Before long they were taking practice cruises on virtually every day of halfway decent weather. They were a hearty, laughter-loving two score and ten, youngsters in the late teens and early twenties, delighted at this novelty, bound and determined to master their ship and lay their wake in rings around those old fogies who grumbled at newfangled foreign foolishness. No longer needed as an instructor, Reid usually stayed behind with Erissa. Time for him and her was shrinking unbearably. And one of his sailors, a slim youth of good looks and good family, who could scarcely keep his eyes off the girl, was named Dagonas.

But she came aboard with Reid for the final test, the test of the ram, before the vessel was officially dedicated. The governor had released a hulk, traded to the state for cannibalizing by a merchant owner who hadn’t considered it worth his while to make those repairs which Sarpedon now carried out. A rival gang, envious boys and skeptical shell-backs, agreed to man the target craft and show up the radicals. Boats came along to rescue whoever got dunked.

It was clear and brisk offshore, whitecaps marching, the by now almost permanent black column out of Pillar Mountain shredded by a gleefully piping wind. Overhead trailed a flight of storks, homeward bound from Egypt to the northlands, heralds of spring. The ram ship leaped and rolled. Its sides were gay with red and blue stripes; on the sails were embroidered dolphins. The waters rushed, the timbers talked, the rigging harped.

Erissa, forward on the upper deck beside Reid, clapped her hands. The hair streamed back off her shoulders, the skirt was pressed against her loins. “Oh, see!” she cried happily. The vessel came about in a rattle of booms, gaffs, and blocks. It had just passed the bows of the conventional ship, which trudged along on oars, unable to come any-where near the wind.

“Stop your fancyfooting and let’s have some action!” bawled the distant skipper.

“Well, I suppose we should,” Reid told Sarpedon, “having proved they can’t lay a grapnel on us.” They looked at each other in shared unsureness. The boys on the thwarts raised a yell.

Standing off, the rammers lowered sail, racked masts, and broke out oars. The target crew poised uneasily at their own oars. They knew what happened in a collision. Both hulls were stove in, along with the ribs of any rowers who didn’t get clear.

Reid went aft to his, quartermaster. “You remember the drill,” he said. “Aim for the, center, but not straight. That could leave us hung up on them. The idea is to rip out the stakes and sheer off”

“Like a bull goring a bear,” Erissa said.

“May that be no evil omen for you, Sister,” the man responded.

“Gods forfend!” Dagonas called, at his bench just below. Erissa smiled down upon him. Reid saw how smooth and lithe the boy’s body was. His own—well, he kept in fair shape. And Erissa was clutching his hand.

The craft, began to move. The coxswain’s chant gathered speed until water seethed white and the hull sprang forward. Abruptly the target:was horrible in its nearness. As directed, it tried to take evasive action. As expected, the rudder-and-tiller combination was so much more efficient than steering oars that no escape was possible.

Reid’s people had rehearsed the maneuver often, against nets supported on logs. Oars on the inner side snapped erect those on the outer continued driving. The noise and shock were less than he had anticipated. Disengaging was awkward—obviously more practice needed there—but it was managed. By then, the struck galley lay heeled far over. Wooden and unloaded, it didn’t sink; but presently it floated awash and the waves were pounding it to pieces.

Cheers pealed from the victors. The vanquished were too busy, swimming to the boats for a response. Reid and Sarpedon made a thorough inspection. “No harm that I can see,” the yardmaster declared. “This ship by itself could drive off a fleet.” He embraced the American. “What you’ve done! What you’ve done!”

Erissa was there. “You are a god,” she sobbed. They dared not kiss in public, but she knelt and held him around the knees.

Again Atlantis swarmed with preparations for festival. But this was the great one. In the resurrection of Asterion lay that of the world and its dead.

First he must die and be mourned. Forty days before the vernal equinox, the Keftiu hooded altars, screened off caves and springs, bore through the streets their three holy symbols reversed and draped in black, rent their garments, gashed their flesh, and cried on Dictynna for mercy. For thirty days thereafter, most of them abstained from meat, wine, and sexual intercourse; and in their homes, lamps burned perpetually so that beloved ghosts might find the way back.

Not that business stopped. After all, seaborne traffic was starting up again. And however devout, the Keftiu were incapable of long faces for many hours in a row. And the last ten of the forty days were to be pure celebration. The god would not yet have come from hell to claim that Bride Who was also his Mother and Grandmother, but man’s forward-looking joy helped make sure that he would.

Beneath somberness and decorum, excitement bubbled even on the temple isle. Soon the maidens would take ship for. Knossos, to dance with the bulls and the youths: soon, soon. Erissa worked her class daily. Reid stood by, gnawing his nails.

Why did Lydra keep refusing to see him? She couldn’t be that busy. Lord knew she had ample time for Diores, when the Achaean showed up on his frequent missions. Why was she doing nothing about evacuation? She said, when Reid got together the boldness to grab a chance to drop her a few words that she and he alone understood, she said she was in touch with the Minos; and true, boats shuttled across the sixty-mile channel between, written messages borne by male old-timers in her service who were, both illiterate and close-mouthed; she said the matter was under advisement, she said.

Meanwhile the volcano spewed smoke and, ever oftener, flames. Its fine ash made the fields dusty. Sometimes at night you saw fresh lava flow glowing from the mouth; next morning you saw new grotesqueries on those black flanks, and steam puffing white from fumaroles. The ground shivered, the air rumbled. In the taverns men spoke dogmatically and at length of what precautions should be taken against the possibility of a major eruption. Reid didn’t notice that anybody actually did much. Of course, they never imagined what the blowup was going to be like. He himself couldn’t.

If he could tell them!

Well, at worst there were plenty of well-found boats. Practically every Atlantean family owned one and could put to sea, provisioned, on a few hours’ notice. But they couldn’t keep the sea too long; and he didn’t know just when the hammer would fall; and he did know that the time was very short now for him and Erissa to stand on a starlit hilltop, so close together that Pamela and the children couldn’t get in between, and for her to breathe, “We’ll be wedded right after the festival, right after, my darling, my god,” while the mountain growled at his back unheeded save for the glow it cast upon her.

Rain fell anew, but gently, little more than a springtime mist that quickened the earth and if it lasted until morning would not hinder the procession of the maidens to the ships for Crete. But beyond its coolness and the damp odors it awoke lay absolute night.

Lydra confronted Reid beneath the Griffin Judge. In the lamplight her black gown was like another shadow, against which her face thrust startlingly white. From her throne she. said: “I summoned you this late on purpose, exile. There are none to hear us but the guards beyond the door.”

Reid knew with a chill: There need never be any to eavesdrop. The door is thick. Though not too thick for those men to hear a call. And they are wholly vowed to her service.

“What has my lady in mind?” he got forth.

“This,” the Ariadne told him. “You thought to embark tomorrow with your giddy Erissa, did you not? It shall not be. You will remain here.”

Suddenly he knew that his cage had no doors.

“You have been less than candid,” she said. “Did you imagine Diores and I would never talk about your companions in Egypt and so learn what you were withholding about the woman? These are uncanny matters. If you did not tell the whole truth, how can we suppose you did not lie? That you are, not the enemy of him the gods have chosen, Prince, Theseus?”

“My lady,” he heard himself cry, “Theseus is making a tool of you. He’ll abandon you as soon as you’re not needed—”

“Hold your mouth or you’re dead!” she yelled. “Guards! Guards, to me!”

He knew, he knew: Long before, the man with the lion eyes had come into her aloneness and promised her what no other man would have dared, that he would make her his queen if he could: but for this, she must needs aid him in bringing about the downfall of her king.

Why didn’t I see it? he shrieked in his head. Because I wasn’t used to intrigue, but mainly because I didn’t want to kick apart the glittery little paradise she let me spin around myself, he whispered in his head.

He realized: When she passed on to Diores and so to Theseus the word I gave her, that was Lydra’s required service—that, and whatever help she’s been lending to a conspiracy among the metics and the disaffected on Crete, and now her locking me away lest I break the silence.

Through how many springtime nights, while her maidens dreamed and whispered in their dormitory of young men they would meet, through how many years has she prayed for a chance like this? And to what gods?