The Dancer from Atlantis

VI

Awakening from sleep was strange. It locked the final door on escape out of a dream. The twentieth-century world had become the one remote, fantastic, not wholly comprehensible as existent.

“I’m going on scout while my horse can serve me,” Uldin declared, and took off. He appeared less worn than his companions, maybe because his best appearance was so uncouth. While he was gone, the rest sought refuge in the sea. Sticks, lashed together with thongs cut from Oleg’s belt, made a framework on which to hang clothes for protection against direct, sunlight and glare reflected off the water in which they would sit to their necks.

When the awning was ready to, be positioned, Erissa slipped off sandals and tunic. Oleg gasped. “What’s the matter?” she asked him innocently.

“You ... a woman ... a, well—” It couldn’t be seen whether the. Russian blushed under his beet-red sunburn.

Suddenly he laughed. “Well, if that’s the kind of girl you are, this needn’t be the worst day of my life!”

She bridled. “What do you mean? Put down those hands!”

“She’s not of your people, Oleg,” Reid explained. It was obvious to him: “Among hers, nakedness is respectable?” Nevertheless he felt shy about stripping before her Taut and lithe, scarcely marked by the children she had borne, her body was the goodliest he had ever seen.

“Well, turn your eyes, then, wench, till I’ve waded out decently deep,” Oleg huffed.

Once laved and cooled, they felt better. Even the thirst was easier to bean Oleg grudgingly imitated Erissa in following Reid’s advice about sipping from the sea. “I don’t believe, mind you,” he said. “It’ll kill us off faster in the end. But if we can keep going thus for a while, a bit, stronger than otherwise, maybe the saints can find help to send us. You hear me?” he shouted at the sky. “A golden chalice set with precious stones for the Church of St. Boris. Six altar cloths of the finest silk, and scores of pearls sewn on, for St. Mary.” He paused. “I’d best say that in Russian and Romaic too. And, oh, yes, Norse.”

Reid couldn’t resist japing: “Your saints have not been born.” Oleg looked stricken. The American added hastily, “Well, I could be wrong, I suppose?’ No sense in pointing out that Christ—that Abraham, most likely—was also in the future.

He turned to Erissa. “Sleep has cleared my head,” he went on. “Let me think hard about what we know.” And let me stop being so damned aware of what I glimpse of you through the water, his mind added guiltily.

He made careful inquiries of them both, pausing for long times to ponder. They regarded him with respect. Uldin hadn’t shown that; but he had barked curt answers to a few key questions before he left.

Oleg proved a diamond mine of information. Reid decided that the Russian’s bluff manner must be in a large part a disarming mask over a sophisticated intelligence. The Kievan state was not the slum that most of its Western contemporaries were. Eight million people dwelt in a territory as big as the United States east of the Mississippi, a realm stuffed with natural resources cannily exploited. Trade with the Byzantines was steady and heavy, bringing back not just their goods but their arts and ideas. The Russian upper classes, more capitalists than noblemen, were literate, au courant with events abroad as well as at home: they lived in houses equipped with stoves and window glass; they ate with gold and silver spoons, off plates set on sumptuous tablecloths, the meals including delicacies like oranges, lemons, and sugar, dogs, never allowed indoors, had shelters of their own, and customarily a Hungarian groom to care for them and the horses; Kiev in particular was a cosmopolitan home for a dozen different nationalities; the monarchy was not despotic. rather the system granted so much freedom that popular assemblies, in Novgorod especially, often turned into brawls

The point was that Oleg could place himself exactly in space and time: the eastward bend of the Dnieper, early June, 1050 A.D.

Uldin, vaguer, had spoken of recently taking over the land of the East Goths, after having first crushed the Alans, and of greedy speculations about the Roman Empire to the west. From his dippings into history (thank fortune for a good memory!) Reid could delimit the Hun’s scene of departure: the Ukraine, one or two hundred miles from the Crimea in a more or less northwesterly direction; time, the later fourth century A.D.

Erissa posed the trickiest problem, for all her eager cooperation. The name of the island whence she had been seized, Malath, was that bestowed by its largely Keftiu inhabitants. The English equivalent did not automatically come to Reid, any more than he would have known Christiana and Oslo were identical if he had not been so informed.

He set aside the riddle of her former home, Atlantis. A continent that sank? Pure myth; geological impossibility, in any period less than millions of years. And yet the name as used by her bore such a freight of the same meaning, the fair and happy realm which the sea took back unto itself, that it had come through the helmet as more than a label.... Well, she said her Atlantis was gone. Where had she lived afterward? Might a clue be found in what that other folk whose language she also knew called the place?

“Hrodos,” she told him, and all at once he understood. A few queries about its exact location vis-à-vis the mainland clinched the matter. Rhodes.

He shut his eyes and visualized, again, a terrestrial globe. It was reasonable to assume the space-time vehicle had followed the most nearly direct geographical course it could. The assumption was strengthened by the fact that Hawaii, the ship’s position in the North Pacific, the bend of the Dnieper, the southern Ukraine, and Rhodes did lie approximately on a great circle.

Okay, Reid thought in rising, tingling excitement. Extrapolate. What’s the next shore you hit?

Western Egypt or eastern Libya. A seacoast desert, if I remember aright.

He opened his eyes. Erissa’s hazel gaze was waiting for him. Briefly, he almost drowned in it. He yanked himself back from beauty and said, “I think I have reasoned out where we are.”

“Oh, Duncan!” She rose to her knees and hugged him. Tired, thirsty, hungry, in mortal trouble, he felt her breasts press, her lips touch.

Oleg coughed. Erissa let Reid go. The American sought to explain. It took a minute, because the woman called Egypt “Khem,” which she said was the native as well as Keftiu name. When she grasped his intent, a little of the happiness went out of her. “Yes, the Achaians say ‘Aigyptos.’ Does so scant a recollection of my poor folk remain in your world?”

“Egypt.” Oleg tugged his beard. “That fits, gauging by what I’ve heard from sailors who ply the route. Myself, I never got further than Jerusalem?’ He cocked a glance at the improvised canopy and heaven above. “I wass on pilgrimage,” he reminded the saints. “The Saracens made endless fuss and inconvenience. I brought back a flask of Jordan water and gave it to the Sophia Cathedral that Knyaz Yaroslav the Wise built in Kiev.”

Erissa brightened. “We have no bad chance of rescue. Ships go to and from Egypt throughout the summer.” Distress descended anew upon her. She winced at a tormenting recollection. “The crew might take us only to sell for slaves, though.”

Reid patted her knee. “I have a trick or two that should discourage them,” he said more confidently than he felt, just to see her glow.

Wait a bit, flashed within him. If she knows anything about contemporary Egypt, maybe that’ll give me a date. Not that I’m really up on Pharaonic chronology—this period’s got to be Pharaonic—but

Irrelevantly, his intellect drew a graph of the futurian machine’s path, distance covered versus time. Assuming Sahir’s era was some centuries beyond the American’s, and Erissa’s one or a few thousand years before Christ, you got a diagram resembling half a hysteresis curve. Might that be significant, might it help, explain the “inertia” effect? Never mind, never mind.

“Hee-yah!” The shout brought their heads out from under the cloths. Uldin sat his horse atop the bluff which fronted on the beach. The gestures of his saber were violent. They hurried from the water, scrambled into their garments and up the rough hot slope.

The Hun was furious. He spat at their feet. “Lolling about like hogs! Do you claim you’re men, you two?”

Oleg hefted his ax, Erissa her knife. Reid swallowed. He thought: I’m not the one to respond. I’m the shy guy, the stutterer, the citizen who does nothing in politics except vote, the husband who quietly walks away when an, argument brews with his wife—

Somehow he looked up into the steamed features and said: “Better we keep our health and wits than rush about like beetles, Uldin. I spent the time getting facts. Now we know where we are and what we can await,”

The. Hun’s face went blank. After a moment he replied: “You did not say you are a shaman, Duncan, nor do I believe you are. But you may have more wisdom than I thought. Let’s not quarrel, let’s make ready. I saw men from afar, headed this way. They’re on foot, a scrawny and tattered lot, but they’re armed and I didn’t like the look of them. If a herdboy went to their camp, this dawn and told how last night he’d seen a treasure that shone and a mere four to guard it, they’d come here.”

“Umph,” Oleg said. “When will they arrive?”

“They could make it by high noon. But my guess is they’ll rest during the heat of the day Toward evening, then.”

“Good. I needn’t don that oven of A byrnie at once. Should we flee?”

Reid shook his head. “The odds are against our getting far,” he said ‘‘We might shake off pursuit, but the desert will kill us. Let’s stay where we are and think how we can bargain with the natives”

“Bargaining goes hard when your throat’s cut,” Uldin laughed. “Pack your gear. If we wade the first part of the way, it’ll break our trail.”

“You suppose they can’t be reasoned with,” Reid argued. Oleg and Uldin peered at him. “Why, of course they can’t,” the Russian said. “They’re wasteland dwellers.”

“Can’t we at least overawe them? I’d rather stay here and try what can be done than stagger off to die in three or four miserable days.”

Uldin slapped his thigh, a pistol crack. “Get moving!” he ordered.

“No,” Reid answered.

Erissa took his arm. You two go if you are afraid, she said scornfully. “We stay.”

Oleg scratched his shaggy chest. “Well,” he mumbled. “Well ... me too. You may be right.”

Uldin gave them a freezing glare. They stood firm beneath his saddle. “You leave me no choice,” he snapped. “What’s your plan?”

Put up or shut up, Reid thought, and he wondered if this was how leaders were made. I’ll work on a show that may impress them,” he said. “We have the vehicle itself—and, for instance—” He demonstrated his pipe lighter. The spurt of flame drew exclamations. “We’ll want defenses, of course, in case we do have to fight. You, Uldin, Oleg, take charge of that. I should imagine that between you—a mounted bowman, an ironclad warrior—you’ll make a pack of starvelings wary about attacking. Erissa, you and I will gather sticks for a signal fire, in case a ship comes by”

—She said to him when they were working alone: “I wonder more and more if this is wise, Duncan. A captain might not dare stand in. He might take our beacon for a lure. Or if he does land, he might well see us as prey, to be robbed and enslaved. Maybe we should trust in the Goddess and our ability to make the desert folk guide us to Egypt. The sea lanes grow ever more perilous and cruel, when the strong hand of the Minos is no longer lifted against piracy.”

“Minos!” he cried, jarred; and the knowledge of where and when he was stood blindingly before him.

He started to ask her out—the Keftiu, yes, the people of Keft, a large island in the Midworld Sea between Egypt and those lands the Achaeans had overrun—Crete!—yes, the second language she knew was Achaean, everybody with foreign connections must master it, now that those barbarians were swarming into the Aegean Sea and too arrogant to learn the speech once spoken in stately Knossos and on lost Atlantis—

Achaean ran through Reid. He had no more Greek than the average educated twentieth-century American, but that was enough to open for him the identity of the tongue he had learned. He saw past the patterns of an alphabet which hadn’t evolved yet, to the language itself, and knew that Achaean was an ancestor of Hellenic.

And that was where the name “Atlantis” came from. “Land of the Pillar” translated into Gaia Atlantis. “Sail ho!” Oleg bellowed.

The ship was large for its milieu, a ninety-footer. When there was no fair wind, it put out fifty: oars. The hull, black with pitch, was wide amidships (Erissa said this was a merchantman, not a slender warcraft), rounded in the stern, rising sheer from a cutwater in the bows. Stem and stern alike were decked over, protected by wicker bulwarks and ornamented with carved and colored posts in the forms of a horsehead and a fishtail. Two huge painted eyes stared forward. Under the rowing benches that stretched between the sides, planks were laid so that men need not clamber across the cargo stowed in the bottom. At present the mast was down; it, the yard, and the sail were lashed in the crotches of two Y-shaped racks fore and aft. Keel barely aground in the shallows, the vessel waited.

Most of its, crew stayed aboard, alert. Sun glared off bronze spearheads. Otherwise metal was scarce. The squarish shields had only rivets securing several plies of boiled cowhide to wooden frames. The common sailor made do with body protection of leather over a tunic like Erissa’s, or with none.

Diores, the captain, and the seven young men who accompanied him ashore were a gorgeous exception. They could afford the best; shortage of copper and tin was the economic foundation of the military aristocracy which ruled most of the Bronze Age world. In high-plumed helmets, ornate breastplates, brass facings on shields and on the leather strips that dangled past their kilts, greaves on shins, leaf-shaped swords in gold-ornamented scabbards, cloaks dyed in reds and blues and saffron, they might have walked straight out of the Iliad.

They’ll walk straight into it, Reid thought eerily. Asking, he had learned Troy was a strong and prosperous city-state; but here before him stood the Achaeans—Danaans, Argives, Hellenes—the forebears of Agamemnon and Odysseus.

They were tall, fair-complexioned, long-skulled men, their own progenitors come down from the North not very many generations back; brown hair was ordinary among them, yellow and red not rare. They wore it shoulder-length, and those who could raise a beard and mustache—the percentage of youths was high—favored a kind of Vandyke style. They carried themselves with the almost unconscious haughtiness of warriors born.

“Well, now,” Diores said. “Strange. Strange in truth, ‘tis.”

The castaways had decided not to complicate an already incredible story with a time travel element that none but the American came anywhere near comprehending;anyway. ft was more than sufficient that they had been carried here from their respective homelands by the glowing chariot of a wizard who died before he could get beyond demonstrat ing his magical language teacher. Diores had ordered the body uncovered, and properly buried after his inspection.

He clicked his tongue. “Zeus thunder me, what a weird yarn!” He put a habitual drawl into the generally rapid-fire Attic dialect. “I don’t know as how I ought to take you aboard. I honestly don’t. You could be under the wrath of god.”

“But—but—” Reid waved helplessly at the mental set. “We’ll give that to your king.”

Diores squinted. He was smaller and darker than most of his followers, grizzled, but tough, quick-moving, eyes winter-gray in the seamed sharp countenance. “Well, now, don’t get me wrong,” he said. “I’d like to. By Aphrodite’s tits, I’d like to. You particular, sir—” he nodded at Oleg—“clad in the foreign metal iron. We hear rumors they’ve learned how to work it in Hittite lands but the Great King’s keeping that secret for himself Might you know—? Oh, we could spin many a fine yarn. But what’s the use if Poseidon whelms us? And he has a touchy temper, Poseidon does, this time of year, the equinoctial storms’ll soon be along.” His calculating gaze strayed to Uldin, who had remained mounted. “And you, sir, that ride your horse ’stead of coming behind in a chariot, I’d give a fat ox to know what the idea is. Won’t you fall off in battle? And you want to take the beast aboard!”

“I’ll not be parted from him,” Uldin snapped.

“Horses are sacred to Poseidon, aren’t they?” Reid put in quickly.

“Yes, true, true, but the practical problems ... we already have a brace of sheep and our land-finding doves. And some days’ faring to reach home, you know. And I’ll tell you confidential, this hasn’t been a plain trading trip. Not quite. Oh, we laid to at Avaris and the men bartered and enjoyed the inns and stews, right, right. But a few of us traveled upriver to Memphis, the capital, you know, bearing a word from my prince, and now I’ve a word to take back to him. Can’t risk losing that, can I, me who’s served the royal family man and boy since before the prince was born?”

“Will you keep us here sweltering the whole day, till the tribesmen arrive?” Uldin yelled.

“Calm down,” Oleg told him. He studied Dimes, his mien as pawky as the, Achaean’s. “It’s true we’ll cause you extra trouble, Captain,” he murmured. “I’m sorry for that. But might you accept—a gift between gentlemen, naturally, a slight repayment for your noble generosity when you broached yon water cask for us—would you allow me to show you, as well as your king, that we’re not beggars?”

He had dipped into his purse while he talked. The gold coins flashed for half a second before Diores’ deft fingers closed on them.

“Plain to see, you’re folk of good breeding,” the Achaean said blandly, “and that alone obliges me to help you in any way I can. Do come aboard. Do. The horse—sir, if you’ll agree to sacrifice your horse here on this shore for a safe voyage, you can have your pick out of my own herd when we arrive. That I swear.”

Uldin muttered but gave in. Diores made a welcoming gesture at his ship.

“Rhodes first,” Erissa said. Ecstasy flooded from her. “Duncan, Duncan, you’ll see our sort”

Reid’s stupefaction and her joy were cut off by Diores: “I’m afraid not. I amon a mission for Prince Theseus, and can’t go out of my way. The only reason we came this far west after leaving the Nile Delta was—”

“Fear of the pirates in the Aegean islands,” she said bitterly.

“What? Pirates? Has the sun addled your wits? No disrespect milady. I know how high womenfolk rank among the Cretans, and you must have been a, sacred bull dancer when young, right? Nothing else would explain that carriage of yours. Ah, yes. But as for pirates, no, never, d’you think we’re in Tyrrhenian waters? It’s simply that, with the wind as is I gauge our best course is around the west end of Crete and then slide along past the Peloponnesus to Athens. You can take passage thence for Rhodes, next spring at latest.”

In her disappointment she was not mollified. “You speak as if the Minos and his navy still kept the peace of the sea for honest folk.” Venom edged her voice.

“I do believe you should go aboard and rest, my lady, out of the sun.” Diores’ geniality stayed unbroken. “Last time I called at Knossos, and that was outbound on this trip to leave off some cargo, hardly a month back, the Minos sat in the Labyrinth and his customs officers were fattening on his tithe same as always.”

She whitened.

“Worse luck,” growled a subordinate officer. “How long, Father Zeus, must we bear his yoke?” His friends looked equally angered.