The Dancer from Atlantis (9 page)

The atmosphere did not turn unfriendly. The sailors obviously dismissed the incomprehensible remarks about time travel, setting
that down to a misunderstanding quite natural when the speaker was from parts as remote as Oleg became careful to put his
Russia and Byzantine Empire. It helped that, far from being accursed, this passage enjoyed unusually fair winds. Reid wasn’t
sure how much was believed of what the Novgorodian related – and the Hun, after he came out of his shell; but everybody liked
a good yarn. For their part, the crew were glad of fresh ears for their own stories: trading voyages where the Minoan navy
kept watch, plundering and slave raiding elsewhere; hunting on the mainland, deer, bear, pig, the aurochs and lion that still
roamed Europe; clashes with wild mountaineers or with other Achaean statelets; brawls, binges, lickerish recollections of
harbortown hetaerae and temples in Asia where a maiden must take the first man who would have her before she could marry;
tales, solemnly sworn to, of gods and ghosts and monsters….

Reid avoided saying much about his milieu and concentrated on learning about this. The Achaeans were a race of husbandmen,
he was told. The very kings plowed their own fields and did their own carpentry. The poorest yeoman had his jealously guarded
rights. Among the turbulent nobles (those men wealthy enough to own the full panoply of bronze war-gear that made a common
soldier easy meat for them) the king (the sachem, Reid thought) was no more than
primus inter pares.
Women did not have the complete equality of their Keftiu sisters, which Diores scoffed at as hen-predominance; but neither
did they suffer the purdah of Classical Greece; a matron was honored in her household.

Only for a few generations, and thus far only in a few of their countries, had the Achaeans taken to the sea in any numbers.
Diores was one of the rare skippers among them who would boldly strike straight across a days-wide stretch of open water,
which the Keftiu routinely did. But his folk were superb stockbreeders and charioteers; not a man of them but wasn’t a
fanatical expert on horseflesh, and their note-comparing and arguing with Uldin rattled on for hours at a time.

They stood unshakable by their families, their chieftains, and their pledged word. A man was expected to be as hospitable
and open-handed as his means allowed. He kept himself clean, well groomed, and in trim; he knew the lore and laws; he appreciated
quality in an artisan, a dancer, a bard; he looked misfortune and death squarely in the eyes.

Against this, Reid could place a pride that might at any instant bring on a fit of the sulks or of murderousness; a bloodthirsty
delight in battle; an absolute lack of feeling for anyone considered inferior – and if you were not a freeborn Achaean or
a pretty damn powerful foreigner, you were inferior; a quarrelsomeness that kept the people divided into contending micro-kingdoms
which often split further in civil war.

‘There’s a reason the Cretans lord it over us,’ Diores remarked, standing in the bows beside Reid while he observed the flight
of a released dove. ‘Could be the top reason. We can’t pull together. Not that the Labyrinth ever gives us a chance to. The
big mainland cities, Mycenae, Tiryns, that gaggle, they’ve sold out. Cretan wares. Cretan manners, Cretan rites. Cretan this
and that till a man could puke. How I wish they’d go the whole road and put themselves straight under the Minos! But no, he’s
too smart, that’n. He keeps their bootlicker kings, who can sit at council with ours, plot and bribe and turn true Achaean
against Achaean. And when somebody plans a break for freedom, the way my King Aegeus did, be sure a spy from Mycenae or Tiryns
will find out and squirm off to squeal it in Knossos.’

‘And then?’ Reid asked.

‘Why, then the Minos whistles up his navy and blockades every port and grabs the ships of every vassal and – argh! – ‘ally’
who won’t send men to help. So they help him. And that’s why next year seven more boys and seven more girls will fare from
Athens to the Minotaur.’

Diores broke off, shaded his eyes, peered ahead for a while, until he said in a casual tone: ‘There she be. Now you can begin
to see what the bird saw. Can you make out that little blur on the world-edge? A peak on Crete. Got to be, I swear by Aphrodite’s
belly.’

They rounded the great island before sundown. Cliffs stood white. Behind, the country lifted steep and green. Vessels
crossed the waters as thickly as gulls crossed the sky. Erissa stood by the rail, looking. She had made no show of unhappiness
these past days. She had merely spoken no more than was needful, and otherwise sat alone with her thoughts. Reid sought her.

Her face did not turn toward him. He wondered what fears and longings dwelt behind that clear profile. As if reading his mind,
she said low, ‘Don’t fret yourself about me, Duncan. The years have taught me how to wait.’

Next eventide the Peloponnesus rose rugged from violet waves. The open hills, speckled with villages, and the water traffic
that Reid remembered were not here. Forest lay deeply green; loneliness filled sea and sky, a quiet in which the
chunk
and splash of oars sounded too noisy and the coxswain softened his chant. The air was cool. A pair of cranes, high aloft,
caught the light golden on their wings.

Diores indicated the island of Kythera a few miles offshore. It resembled a piece of the mainland. ‘Two days left to the Piraeus,
maybe less,’ he said. ‘But we’ll stop here the night, give a thank-offering for an easy voyage, stretch our legs and sleep
where we’ve got room to turn around in.’

The beach in a little bay bore signs of use: fire-blackened circles of rock, bits of rope and other inoffensive refuse, a
beehive-shaped stone tomb opposite a crude wooden god whose most conspicuous feature was the phallus, a trail winding inward
under the trees toward what Diores said was a spring. But tonight his ship had the site to itself. The sailors grounded the
hull, put a boulder anchor astern and took a hawser along when they waded ashore.

Uldin reeled on his feet. ‘This place is haunted!’ he roared, drew his saber and glared about him. ‘The land wobbles!’

‘It’ll stop,’ Oleg grinned. ‘Here’s a good medicine for that.’ He ran to join the men who were uncramping themselves by footraces,
wrestling matches, leapfrogging, and war whoops. Diores let them go on for half an hour before he called them to make camp,
gather wood and start a fire.

Erissa had sought the tomb. Leaving the cloak around her lower body, she pulled off her tunic; bare-breasted, she knelt, clutched
her amulet and bent her loose-tressed head in prayer. Diores looked uneasy. ‘I wish I’d halted her,’ he muttered to Reid.
‘Would’ve, if I’d noticed in time.’

‘What’s she doing?’

‘Asking for an oracle dream, I suppose. I wanted to do that. He’s said to be uncommon powerful, the man buried here. Now I
can’t; he might not like it twice in the same evening. And I’d have given him part of the sacrifice, too.’ Diores tugged his
beard, scowling. ‘I wonder what vow she’s making in its place. That’s no ordinary she-Cretan, Duncan, mate; not even an ordinary
sister of the bull dance. There’s something peculiar about her. I’d give her a wide berth if I was you.’

Erissa resumed her tunic and stood aside. She seemed to have gained a measure of inward calm. Reid didn’t venture to address
her. He was finding out how alien her world was to him.

Night had fallen before the campfire coals were ready to roast the sheep which had been brought from Egypt for this landing.
The sacrifice was brief but impressive: tall men standing ranked in leaping red light and wavering shadow, weapons lifted
in salute to Hermes the Wayfarer; Diores’ chanted invocation; his solemn slaughter of the animals, cutting out of the thighbones,
wrapping them in fat, casting them in the fire; deep-voiced
‘Xareis! Xareis! Xareis!’
rising like the smoke toward the stars; clangor of swords beaten on helmets and brass-faced shields.

Oleg crossed himself. Uldin nicked his thumb and squeezed some blood into the flames. Reid couldn’t see Erissa in the dark.

She shared the meal that followed. It was a light-hearted gorge. The wineskins passed freely. Afterward a warrior stood, plucked
a lyre and chanted a lay—

– while his comrades stamped out a dance on the sand.

When they sat down, Uldin rose. ‘I will sing you a song,’ he offered.

‘Then me,’ Oleg said. ‘A song of a wanderer far from his
home, his dear ones, his Mother Novgorod.’ He dabbed at his eyes and hiccoughed.

‘Mine is of the steppe,’ Uldin said, ‘the grassland where poppies flare like blood in springtime and the foals stand on unsure
new legs, their muzzles softer than a girl baby’s cheek, and dream of the day when they shall gallop untiring to the roots
of the rainbow.’

He lifted his head. The words were in his own language, but the melody and his voice astonishingly sweet.

Reid had planted himself well back from the group around the fire, to observe. Abruptly he felt his sleeve plucked. Turning,
he made out Erissa’s vague form. His heart skipped a beat. He rose, quietly as possible, and slipped after her, around the
circle of light to the trail.

It was dark under the trees. They groped their way hand in hand. After some minutes’ uphill stumbling, they came out in the
open.

Surrounded on three sides by forest, a meadow sloped down to the shore. The moon was aloft, waning toward the half. Reid had
often admired it at sea before going to sleep; but this was sorcery. Full over an empty ocean, it had not cast the glade it
did on these waters of Erissa’s Goddess, which lay so still that stars and a lamp-white planet were mirrored in their night.
Grass and boulders were starred also, with dewdrops. The air here was warmer than at the strand, as if the woods breathed
out the day they had hoarded. Their odor was of damp mould, leaves, pungencies. An owl hooted gently. The spring rilled between
mossy stones.

Erissa sighed. ‘I hoped for this,’ she said low: ‘a place that must be holy with Her nearness, where we can talk.’

He had dreaded that. But now, the moment come, he knew her sense of fate, neither sad nor glad, a strong resignation he had
never thought might be.

She spread her cloak. They sat down, facing the water. Her fingers stroked the beard growing on him. He saw by moonlight how
tender was her smile. ‘You come daily closer to the Duncan I knew,’ she murmured.

‘Tell me what happened,’ he said as quietly.

She shook her head. ‘I am not sure. I recall very little from the end, shards, fading mists, here a hand that consoled me,
there a word spoken – and the witch, the witch who made me sleep and forget….’ She sighed again. ‘A mercy, perhaps, to
judge from what horrors remain to me. I’ve often wished the same veil drawn over what came afterward.’

She gripped his hand, painfully hard. ‘We in the boat – Dagonas and I – thought to make for the eastern islands, find refuge
in one of the Keftiu colonies,’ she said. ‘But we could not see sun or sky through those lightning-riven clouds, through the
ashen rain; and the waters were torn, crazed by the hurt that had come to them; and then a wind sprang up, driving us helpless
before its howling. We could just keep afloat. When at last it grew calmer, we spied a ship. But they were Trojans aboard,
bound home after the blackness terrified them from the voyage they had embarked on. They made us captive; and when we got
there, we went for slaves.’

She drew breath. No matter what she had gained from the sight of Crete or from the oracular hero, these were deep wounds she
was breaking open afresh. Reid’s calm was shaken too. Automatically, he drew forth pipe and tobacco.

The distraction might have been ordained by the Goddess’ infant Son in prankish kindliness, as Erissa suggested with an unsteady
small laugh. By the time he had explained what he was about, she could speak almost detachedly. He comforted himself with
the love-bite of smoke and listened, his fingers enfolding hers:

‘My purchaser was called Mydon. He was of Achaean blood – they’ve bought and bullied their way into the Troad too, did you
know? – but not the worst of masters, really. And Dagonas was there. He’d showed himself off, courting Mydon, to be taken
along with me, and got to be a clerk for him. Thus we ended in the same household. I do remember how you, Duncan, gave me
into Dagonas’ care when we parted. And still you deny you’re a god?

‘When Deukalion was born – your son; I know with all my blood he must be yours – I named him thus because it sounded close
to your name, and because I swore he likewise would become the father of nations – I couldn’t let him be raised a slave. I
bided my time for a second year, watching, planning, preparing. Dagonas grew patient also, after I showed him how there must
be a fate in this. When at last we slipped away, Deukalion in my arms, I meant to leave Mydon’s daughter out of me strangled,
my farewell gift to him. But she was so tiny in her crib, I couldn’t. I hope he has let her have some happiness.

‘We took the boat we’d hidden and provisioned, and set off.
Our aim was to creep south to the Dodecanese Keftiu. Again the wind was foul, though, driving us north till we stranded on
the shores of Thrace. There we found refuge among the wild hillfolk and abode for several years. At first we were welcome
because we made gifts of things we’d stolen from Troy. Later Dagonas became an important man because he’s clever and knows
many Keftiu arts. For my part, though I was only a lay sister on Atlantis, not a priestess, I taught them things about the
worship of the Goddess and Asterion that pleased them. In return, they took me into their guild of witches. There, besides
magic, I gained healing craft unknown in Greece or the islands – herbs, treatments, the casting of the Sleep – and these have
since given me stature where I live. So it was no ill-willing god who blew us to Thrace. It must have been the destiny you
laid on me.