The Dancer from Atlantis (2 page)

He’d kept remembering people who were relaxed and friendly, and boats white-winged on Puget Sound, and Mount Rainier’s snowpeak
floating high and pure above, and virgin forest a couple of hours’ drive from downtown. To Pam, of course, Chicago was home.
Well, Evanston was, which made a difference. When he finally landed a position in Seattle and they moved, she found the city
a backwater, where the weather seemed to be mostly leaden skies, or rain, or fog, or rain, or snow, or rain. … Had he, waiting
happily for the next cataract of sunshine, failed to notice how the rain gnawed at her?

‘Yeah, we’re lucky, I guess, living where we do,’ Stockton said. ‘Apart from those medieval liquor laws.’

Reid chuckled. ‘Come, now. No medieval king would have dared pass liquor laws that barbaric’

Then, as his mood was lifting a trifle, Stockton told him, ‘I’d better go on to the engine room. Nice talking,’ and was quickly
out of sight.

Reid sighed, leaned elbows on rail, and drew on his pipe. The night sea went
hush-hush-hush.
Tomorrow Pam might feel happier. He could hope for that, and hope Japan would turn out to be a fairytale as advertised, and
beyond—

Beyond? His mind, free-associating, conjured up a globe. Besides excellent spatial perception, which he’d better have in his
profession, he was gifted with an uncommon memory. He could draw the course if the ship continued past Yokohama. It wouldn’t.
The owners knew better. Reach Southeast Asia, or pretty close. Hard to understand that at this moment human beings were maiming
and killing human beings whose names they would never know. Damn the ideologies! When would the torment be over? Or had every
year always been tragic, would every year always be? Reid remembered another young man who died in another war, a lifetime
ago, and certain lines he had written.

Rupert Brooke could say it, though. Thanks for that, Dad. An English professor in a tiny Midwestern college hadn’t had a lot
of money for his children – wherefore Reid, earning his own, needed an extra year to graduate – but he gave them stubbornness
about what was right, wide-ranging curiosity, the friendship of books – maybe too close a friendship, stealing time that was
really Pam’s. … No more brooding, Reid decided. A few final turns around the deck, and probably by then she’d have fallen
asleep and he could do likewise.

He clamped the pipe between his teeth and straightened.

And the vortex seized him, the black thunders, he had no moment to cry in before he was snatched from the world.

Where the Dnieper snaked in its eastward bend, grassland gave way to high bluffs through which the river hastened, ringing
aloud as it dashed itself over rocks and down rapids. Here ships must be unloaded and towed, in several places hauled ashore
on rollers, and cargoes must be portaged. Formerly this had been the most dangerous part of the yearly voyage. Pecheneg tribesmen
were wont to lurk nearby, ready to ride down upon the crews when these were afoot and vulnerable, plunder their goods and
make slaves of whoever were not lucky enough to be killed. Oleg Vladimirovitch had been in one such fight as an apprentice.
In it, by God’s grace, the Russians sent the raiders off bewailing their own dead and took many husky prisoners to sell in
Constantinople.

Things were far better since Grand Prince Yaroslav – what a man, cripple though he was! – trounced the heathen. He did it
at the gates of Kiev, so thoroughly that ravens afterward gorged themselves till they could not fly and no Pecheneg was ever
again seen in his realm. Oleg was in the host on that wondrous day: his first taste of real war, thirteen years ago, he a
fuzzy-cheeked lout of seventeen winters. Later he rode against the Lithuanians, and later still sailed on the ill-fated expedition
against the Imperial city. But mainly he was a trader, who wanted no troubles that cut into profit. (Tavern brawls didn’t
count, they nourished the soul, if you made sure to clear out before the Emperor’s police arrived.) He was happy that the
Greeks were likewise sensible and, soon after throwing back the Russians, resumed business with them.

‘Yes,’ he said to the bumper of kvass in his hand, ‘peace and brotherly love, those are good for trade, as Our Lord preached
when he walked this earth.’

He stood on a clifftop overlooking the stream and the fleet. It was beneath the dignity of a shipowner to haul on cables or
lug bales; and he had three vessels by now, not bad for a boy who in birchbark leggings had run traplines through northern
woods. His skippers could oversee the work. But sentries were needed. Not that anyone expected bandits; however, the furs,
hides, amber, tallow, beeswax being transported would fetch a
price down south that just might draw many masterless landloupers together for a single swoop.

‘To you, Ekaterina Borisovna,’ Oleg said, raising his cup. It was for traveling, wooden, albeit silver-trimmed to show the
world that he was a man of consequence at home in Novgorod.

While the thin sour beer went down, he was thinking less of his wife or, for that matter, various slave and servant girls,
than of a tricksy little minx at journey’s end last year. Would Zoe again be available? If so, that gave him an added reason,
besides extending his connections among the foreign merchants resident in Constantinople, for wintering there. Though Zoe,
hm, over several months Zoe might prove painfully expensive.

Bees hummed in clover, cornflowers blazed blue as the over-arching, sun-spilling sky. Below Oleg, men swarmed about the bright-hued
swan- and dragon-headed ships. They must be longing for the Black Sea: in oars and up mast, loaf and let the wind carry you
on, never thinking about the currents, never caring that that was when the poor devil of an owner must worry most about a
wreck. Their shouts and oaths were lost across a mile or two, blent into the clangor of great Father Dnieper. These heights
knew quietness, heat, sweat trickling down ribs and soaking into the quilted padding beneath the chainmail coat, which began
to drag on the shoulders, but high, high overhead a lark chanted, and the joy floated earthward while a mild buzzing from
the beer rose to meet it. …

Oleg smiled at everything which lay in his tomorrows.

And the vortex took him.

Winters were less strong here than on the plains over which Uldin’s forebears went drifting and storming. Here snowfall was
scant, most years, and a man had no need to grease his face against the cold. But he could nevertheless lose livestock to
hunger and weather if he did not ride the range and take care of his beasts – especially when lambing time drew near.

Uldin’s followers numbered only half a dozen, including two unarmed slaves. The East Goths had fled into a Roman realm which
would not likely prove hospitable. Some stayed, of course, the slain and those who were captured and beaten into meekness.
For the past three years the Huns had lived in peace, settling into their newly conquered land.

It lay white beneath low gray clouds. Here and there stood leafless trees. The snags of a garth sacked and burnt were the
last sign of farming. Fences had been torn down for firewood and grain had yielded to grass. Breath smoked on a raw wind.
The hoofs of the ponies plopped in snow, clattered on ground frozen hard. Saddle leather squeaked and bits jingled.

Uldin’s son Oktar edged alongside. He was barely old enough to ride along, his father being young, but already he showed in
height and pale skin the Alanic blood of his mother. She had been Uldin’s first woman, a slave given him by his own father
when he reached an age to enjoy her. He finally lost her, gambling with a man of another tribe at a Sun Festival meeting,
and didn’t know what her life became afterward, though for a while he had idly wondered.

‘We can reach camp tonight if we push hard,’ the boy said importantly. Uldin half raised his quirt and Oktar added in haste,
‘Honored sire.’

‘We won’t,’ Uldin answered. ‘I’ll not weary horses for you to sleep earlier in a warm yurt. We’ll stretch our bags at he made
a nomad’s quick estimate – ‘Bone Place.’ Oktar’s eyes widened and he gulped. Uldin barked a laugh. ‘What, afraid of wolf-scattered
Gothic skeletons? If they alive couldn’t stop us slaughtering them, who fears their thin ghosts? Say boo to them.’ He jerked
his head in dismissal and Oktar fell behind with the rest.

Uldin would, in truth, also have liked to make the main encampment. Riding the range at this season was no sport. In summer
the entire tribe traveled with their herds, and a man could nearly always be home at eventide after a day’s work or hunt.
That was good: creaking ox-drawn wagons; smells of smoke, roasting meat, live horseflesh, fellowmen’s sweat, dung and piss,
closeness
within the huge grass-rippling horizon, beneath huge hawk-haunted heaven; noise, laughter, gluttonous eating; after nightfall,
gatherings about the fires, flames whirling and crackling aloft, picking the faces of trusty friends out of unrestful shadows;
talk, perhaps thoughtful or perhaps bragging, maybe a lay of heroic times to inspire the young, ancient times when the Middle
Kingdom itself feared the Hunnish Empire, or maybe a jolly bawdy song howled forth to the thutter of drums, and tweedle of
flutes while men stamped a ring-dance; and kumiss, bowl after bowl of rich fermented mare’s milk until a man became a stallion
and sought his yurt and his women…. Yes, barring lightning storms (Uldin made a hasty sign against demons, taught him by the
shaman at his initiation),
summer was good, and to arrive home now would be to have a foretaste of it.

However, no softness could be allowed. It was bad for discipline if nothing else, and what was a tribe without discipline?
Uldin drew from beneath his saddlegirth the tally stick on which he had recorded the size of his flocks, and made a show of
studying it.

Not small. Nor big. He was no clan chief, just the head of a household, so-and-so many younger sons and the like who had given
him their pledge, together with their dependents and his own children, wives, concubines, hirelings, slaves, horses, cattle,
sheep, dogs, wagons, gear, and plunder.

Plunder. He had won little of that when the Huns were overrunning the Alans east of the Don River, for in those years he was
but a youth learning the trade of war. The sack of the Gothic holdings had enriched him somewhat. Now, when grazing had been
made ample, he would do best to trade silver and silks for livestock and let natural increase bring him the only wealth that
was really real.

But his gaze drifted westward. Beyond this rolling plain, he had heard, were mountains, and beyond the mountains were the
Romans, and it was said they paved their streets with gold. A man might carve himself an empire there, great as the ancestors’,
so that folk a thousand years hence would tremble at his name.

No, that chance would hardly come in Uldin’s lifetime. The Huns had no reason to conquer further nor would until their numbers
waxed too large. To be sure, without some battle the skills of war would rust and the tribes become easy prey; hence the West
Goths and others would at least be raided pretty often, which could bring opportunities.

Abide, he told himself. Honor the Powers and the ancestors, stand by your Shanyu and do his will as you expect your household
to do yours, steer your affairs wisely. Then who knows what may come your way?

And the vortex took him.

Again Erissa must seek the heights alone.

She did not know what sent her forth. It might be the whisper of the Goddess or, if this was too bold a thought, a lesser
Being; but no vision had ever come to her on those
pilgrimages
. It might be nothing deeper than a wish to be, for a while,
one
with the moon, with sun, stars, winds, distances, and memories. At such times the house, Dagonas, yes, even the wide fields
and woods that were hers, even the dear tyranny of her children, became another slave kennel to escape from. So relentlessly
was she driven that she seldom believed there was nothing of the divine about it. Surely this was a sacrament she must receive,
over and over, until she was purified for the reunion promised her these four and twenty years ago.

‘Tomorrow dawn I leave,’ she told Dagonas.

Though he had learned the uselessness of protest, he did answer in his mild way, ‘Deukalion could well return meanwhile.’

For a moment her spirit overflowed and stung her eyes, at thought of the tall sea captain who was her oldest son. He was gone
from Malath more than he was on the island; and when home he spent most time with his comely wife and children, or his young
male friends, and this was right and natural. But he had come to have so many of his father’s looks—

The stinging made her aware, too, of how Dagonas had always been kind to the boy who was not his. Of course, he was honored
in having for stepson the child of a god. Nonetheless, his goodness went beyond duty. Erissa smiled and kissed her husband.
‘If he does, pour him a rhyton of Cyprian wine for me,’ she said.

Dagonas was eager that night, knowing she would be absent for days. He had never cared for other women. (Well, he must have
had them in foreign ports, seeing how long a merchant voyage could become, just as she had taken occasional men in his absence;
but after he retired from that life and went into brokerage, it had been entirely they two.) She tried to respond, but her
dreams were on Mount Atabyris and a quarter century in the past.

– She woke before the slaves themselves were up. Fumbling her way in the dark, she got a brand from the hearthfire and lit
a lamp. When she made her ablutions, the water lashed her blood with cold until it raced. She dressed in proper style before
kneeling, signing herself, and saying her prayers at the household shrine. Dagonas had made that image of the Goddess and
the Labrys above, with his own clever hands. Cradling Her Son in Her arms, Our Lady of the Ax seemed by the uncertain light
to stand alive, stirring, as if Her niche were a window that opened upon enormous reaches.