The Dancer from Atlantis (7 page)

‘Rodhos,’ 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 Achaeans 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 was 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 seamed 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 saffrons, 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. It 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 demonstrating 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 a god.’

‘But – but—’ Reid waved helplessly at the
mentatór
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 Diores, 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 son!’

Reid’s stupefaction and her joy were cut off by Diores: ‘I’m afraid not. I
am
on 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, m’lady. 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 water? 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.