The Dancer from Atlantis

VII

At first shipboard was paradise. Reid, stunned by an avalanche of experiences and impressions like none he had imagined—for no historical novelist could give him the total reality—needed day and night and part of the day that followed to see that shipboard was, in fact, only the absence of hell.

Fed (salt beef, leeks, coarse black bread, mixed wine and water), cooled by a breeze that ruffled his hair, beneath a soft clear sky, amidst the sun’s million sparks flung off a thousand shades of deep, moving, snowy-foamed blue: he sat by a rail and remembered Homer’s line about the multitudinous laughter of the waves. They were smaller than on the ocean, friskier, very close to him as they passed beneath the low gunwale. He could see each ripple and swirl; he marveled anew at how intricate, ever-changing a piece of art was a wave.

The ship plowed forward, a bone in her teeth and wake whirling aft. The decks rocked in a long rhythm, timbers creaked, stays hummed, sometimes a sheet would go snap and the sail thutter to a change of wind or sea. The air, mild and lively, was rich with odors of sun-baked pitch, ozone, saltiness. On the poop the quartermasters—a craft this size had both port and starboard steering oars—stood watch like young gods.

The rest of the crew sat at ease when they were not sprawled under the thwarts for a nap (nude, using the tunic for a pillow, but generally rolled in a sheepskin blanket). Quarters were cramped. However, no trip involved more than a few days continuously afloat; as a rule, vessels hugged the coasts and their crews camped ashore every night.

The men’s eyes kept straying toward the passengers, half curious, half fearful. Who knew what these strangers were? It took a while before any save Diores and his noblemen ventured to say any word beyond a muttered greeting. The sailors talked low-toned among each other, they fiddled at small chores, they made furtive signs which Reid had seen while he traveled about in Mediterranean parts on leave from the Army, thousands of years from now

No matter. They’d get over their shyness when nothing terrible happened. And he was bound for Athens!

Not the Athens he’d loved, he reminded himself. The temples on the Acropolis, the Tower of the Winds, the columns of Olympian Zeus—tiny friendly cafés, their dolmades and tourko and ouzo, smart shops, insane—taxi drivers, old women in black, vendors of hard-roasted corn on the cob, cheerful men who all seem to have cousins in Brooklyn—forget them, because you dare not remember. Forget, too, Aristotle, Pericles, Aeschylus, the victory at Marathon, the siege of Troy, Homer himself. None of it exists, unless perhaps a few tribal chants have lines that will someday be preserved in an epic and thus endure after their makers are millennial dust. Everything else is a ghost, no, less than a ghost, a vision, a fading dream.

You’re bound for the Athens of Prince Theseus.

That much will last to your day. You’ll be thrilled in your boyhood to read how a hero named Theseus slew the gruesome Minotaur

A shadow fell across him.

—the Minotaur which Erissa served.

She joined him, ignoring the crewmen who, crowded back to leave them alone on this bench, kept looking and looking. A borrowed cloak was fastened, not over the shoulders of her tunic but about her waist to form a skirt.

“Why?” Reid asked, pointing at the garment.

She shrugged. “Best I muffle myself like an Achaean woman.” The Keftiu words fell flatly out of her mouth. She stared at the horizon.

“Isn’t this wonderful?” he said, trying clumsily to hearten her. “I can understand why Aphrodite was born from the sea foam.”

“What?” Her eyes, turned the hue of dull jade, swung to him. “What do you speak of?”

“Why, why don’t the Achaeans,” he stammered, “don’t they believe the goddess of ... love ... rose from the sea off Cyprus?”

She sneered. “Aphrodite, cow-teated, barrel-buttocked, the bitch forever in heat?”

• Reid cast an alarmed glance past her. Probably quite a few of those men had a working knowledge of Cretan. Nobody seemed to have heard, though, through the singing air.

“The Goddess, yes, in Her form of Britornartis the Maiden, She arose thus,” Erissa said.

He thought: I suppose the Achaeans kept—will keep—the beautiful myth, giving it to what’s now a primitive fertility figure ... after Crete has been overthrown.

Erissa’s fist smote the rail. “The sea is Hers—and ours!” she cried. “What spell made you forget, Duncan?”

“I tell you, I’m a mortal man, more lost than you are,” he said desperately. “I’m trying to find out what’s happened to us, You’ve gone backward in time yourself, and—”

“Hush.” Self-controlled again, she laid a hand on his arm and whispered: “Not here. Later, as soon as may be, but not here. That Diores isn’t the yokel he pretends. He watches, listens, probes. And he is the enemy.”

Traffic was thinning out as stormy autumn approached, but they spoke to two other ships on their first afternoon. One, rowing into the wind, was a Keftiu-owned freighter, though its crew seemed to be drawn from the whole eastern Mediterranean, bound from Pylos with hides which ought to fetch a goodly amount of timber in Lebanon. The skipper expected to take the wood on to Egypt and swap it for glassware before returning to his home port on Naxos for a season’s ease. Diores explained that such runs had become profitable again since Pharaoh Amenhotep pacified his Syrian province. The other and larger vessel boomed straight toward Avaris, carrying British tin. Its men were still more mixed, including some who, glimpsed across unrestful scores of yards, appeared to be North European recruits. The world today was astonishingly more cosmopolitan than it would be later on in history.

And once, miles off, Reid glimpsed the reason for that. A lean galley quartered the horizon. Several of Diores’ people drew knives at it or made obscene gestures. “What’s yonder craft?” Oleg inquired.

“A Cretan warship,” Diores replied. “On patrol.”

“For distressed mariners,” Erissa said, “and against pirates and barbarians.”

“Against those who’d be free,” an. Achaean boy declared hotly.

“No squabbles,” Diores commanded. The boy slouched aft. Erissa clenched her lips and spoke no more.

Soon after dark the breeze died and the vessel lay hove to under magnificent stars. Gazing at them before he slept, Reid recalled that they too were not eternal. “Tell me,” he asked Erissa, “what constellation heads your Zodiac?”

“The Bull, of course, Asterion’s. Bull, when he awakens from death in the reborn spring: Her voice, which had started sharp, ended in reverence. Through the wan light he saw her kiss her amulet and trace a sign amidst shadow, a cross, the sun’s emblem.

Precession of the equinoxes, he thought. I’ve come back two twelfths of twenty-six thousand years. Well, that isn’t so exact. He shivered, though the night was not especially cold, and crept under a thwart to huddle in the sheepskin Diores had lent him.

At dawn they took down the mast, broke out the oars, and spider-walked to the coxswain’s chant—“Rhyppapai! Rhyppapai! “—creaking and splashing across a sea which shimmered pale blue at first, later sapphire above indigo. Oleg said he wanted exercise and settled down at an oar for two turns in a stretch.

That cracked the men’s reserve. When the breeze lifted (not as favorable as yesterday’s, but Reid was surprised to learn how close this awkward-looking square rig could point) they gathered about the Russian, who sat dangling his legs off the foredeck. They gave him undiluted wine and bestormed him with questions.

“Where you from, stranger?—What’s it like?—Where’ve you been?—What kinds of ship they use in your country?—That armor you were wearing, those weapons, are they really iron?—Iron’s no good, too brittle, even when you can get it out of its ore, which I’ve heard is mucking near impossible. What’s the trick?—Hai, how’re your women?—Your wine? D’you drink beer like Egyptians?” Teeth flashed in brown countenances, bodies shifted around in a dance of muscles, laughter and chatter pealed across the blueness.

Could these frank, merry boys, these far-faring men with skillful hands, be the savages Erissa claimed they were?

She sat on a bench well aft, brooding. Uldin shared it. They didn’t speak. The Hun had uttered hardly a sound after the hour yesterday when he must lean overside while the Achaeans guffawed at his back. He’d gotten over the sickness, but stayed sullen at the loss of face. Or did he crouch alone behind his mask in a wretchedness of terror? This endless water where no horse could move!

Diores lounged, on the deck beside Oleg, picking his teeth and saying little. Reid sat nervously nearby, against the bulwark, embracing knees under chin, hoping the Russian wouldn’t make some gaffe, as hard as he was drink-ing. He was no fool, but after everything which had lately happened to him the temptation to lower his guard and relax must be considerable.

“I’m a man of the Rus, if that’s what you mean.” Oleg drained his beaker and passed it down for more. His yellow locks fluttered from the headband, his eyes twinkled happily in the red cherubic visage, he scratched beneath his shirt and belched. “Don’t know ‘bout the rest. S’pose I lay out the land for you, and you tell me what you rec’nize. That way we’ll get the names straight.”

They settled back to listen. He swigged from the refilled cup and rumbled:

“I’ll start far north. You might like to hear ‘bout that. Woods, mile after mile of woods. Farms too, of course, but you could wander in the woods your whole life. I almost did when I was a sprat. My father, was a merchant, wiped out when first the Poles took Novgorod, then Yaroslav took it back, then the long war ‘tween Yaroslav and his brother stopped our trade south. We went into those woods, took up hunting and trapping. I learned how to get about there, I can tell you. The Finns have, uh, wooden shoes for walk-ing on snow. They’re wizards. Told me how to sing up ,a good wind, though it doesn’t always work for me and, uh, naturally a Christian shouldn’t.” They registered puzzlement, since to them he had just said that he was an anointed one; but evidently they decided he must be an initiate of some mystery cult.

“We came back at last, started over in better times, and I’ve not done badly. Learned another lesson from those early days, too.” Oleg chuckled, drank, and wagged his forefinger. “Trade stopped again, or nearly so, for a couple years after our war with Constantinople. I spent that time in Norway. The king’s a good friend to the Rus; served a while under Yaroslav, in fact; married a daughter of his, I got together many a load of furs in that country. First time I returned to Constantinople, believe you me, I made a killing.”

“You were speaking of your homeland,” a man called,

“Ah. So I was. Novgorod. Would you believe, well inland as ‘tis, Novgorod’s a seaport? Row from Gulf of Finland, up the Neva, ‘cross Lake Ladoga, up the Volkhov to Lake Ilmen, and there you are. ‘Course, you can’t go on. You’ve got to ride overland, make rendezvous on the Dnieper, first. But then it’s water the whole way, ‘cept for the rapids. Kiev’s grown big and fat off that waterway, I can tell you. But me, I stay a Novgorod boy, where the furs and amber are handier to come by. And so at last you reach the Black Sea, and turn south along the coast to Constantinople, and there’s a city, lads, there you have the queen o’ the world.”

“Hold on,” Diores said slowly. “What you call the Black Sea, does it lead through two straits, a small, sea between them, to these waters?”

Oleg nodded vigorously. “You have it hooked. Constantinople’s at the inner end of the northern channel.”

“But there’s no city there,” a crewman protested.

“Oh, you’d not have heard, I suppose:” Oleg said loftily.

“Zeus thunder me, I have!” Diores rapped, all at once become stern. Silence took over, except for thrum and gurgle and the pitiful bleat of the two sheep penned beneath this deck. “I’ve plied these lanes aplenty, you,” Diores said. “Once as far as Colchis under the Caucasus. Nor am I the only Achaean who has.”

“You mean you dare currents in a cockleshell like this?” Oleg exclaimed. “Why, I could almos’ put my fist through the side."

“A guest oughtn’t to tell lies,” Diores said.

“Wait,” Reid began, reaching to touch him.

Oleg shook his head. “Sorry. Too much wine:’ He stared into his cup. “I forgot. We’ve come backward through time. Constantinople’s not been built yet, I s’pose. It will be, though, it will be. I’ve been there. I know.” He tossed the wine off and the cup down into a sailor’s lap.

Diores stayed unmoving. His face might have been a block of driftwood. The listeners below stirred and buzzed. Hands dropped, toward bronze knives; fingers traced signs.

“Oleg,” Reid said. “No more.”

“Why not?” the Russian mumbled. “Truth, isn’ it? Let’s go in business as prophets.”

“No more,” Reid repeated. “I’ve told you where I am from. Heed me."

Oleg bit his lip. Reid turned to Diores. Above the unease that crawled inside him and made his skin prickle, the American donned an apologetic grin. “I should have warned you, Captain,” he said. “My comrade’s given to tall tales. And of course what really happened would confuse anybody.”

“I think we’d better hold off on this kind of talk,” Diores suggested. “Till we’re in the palace in Athens. Right?”