The Dancer from Atlantis (3 page)

Religious duties performed, Erissa made ready to travel. She shed long skirt and open-bosomed jacket for a tunic and stout
sandals; her hair she wound in a knot; at her belt she hung a knife and a wallet to carry food. She swallowed a piece of bread,
a lump of cheese, a cup of mingled wine and water. Softly – no need to rouse them – she stole into the pair of rooms they
had and kissed her four living children by Dagonas farewell. Two boys, two girls, ages from seventeen and soon to be a bride
(O Virgin Britomartis, her age when the god found her! ) to chubby sweet-smelling three. She forgot until she was on her way
that she had not saluted her man.

Westward a few stars still glimmered in sea-blue depths, but the east was turning white, dew gleamed and birds twittered.
Her house was actually not far outside the harbor city; but steeply rising land and dense groves of fig, pomegranate, and
olive trees cut off view of anything save her own holdings.

Dagonas had demurred when she chose the site: ‘Best we live in town, behind its walls. Each year sees more pirates. Here we
would have none to help defend us.’

She had laughed, not merrily but with that bleak noise which ended argument, and replied, ‘After what we have lived through,
my dear, are we afraid of a few curs?’

Later, because he was no weakling, no mainlander who could not cope with a woman unless he had a law making her inferior,
she explained, ‘We’ll build the house stoutly and hire only men who can fight. Thus we can stand off any attack long enough
for a smoke signal to fetch help. I do need broad acres around me, if I’m to breed the sacred bulls.’

Having left the buildings behind and taken an inland trail, she passed one of the meadows where her cattle dwelt. The cows
drowsed in mist-steaming grass or stood with calves clumsily butting their udders. The Father of Minotaurs was also on his
feet, beneath a plane tree whose upper leaves snared the first beams of the unseen sun. She stopped a moment, caught on the
grandeur of his horns. His coat was softly dappled, like shadows on a forest floor, and beneath it his muscles moved like
a calm sea. Oh, holy! The wish to dance with him was an ache within her.

No. The god who fathered Deukalion had thereby taken away her right to do it in Her honor; and time, slowing her down, had
taken away her right as wife and mother to do it for the instruction of the young.

Otherwise she had lost little from her body. Pebbles scrunched beneath her mile-eating stride.

A swineherd, further on where the unpeopled lands began, recognized her and bent the knee. She blessed him but did not pause.
Strictly speaking, she was not entitled to do that. She was no priestess, simply a wise-woman, skilled in the healing arts,
in soothsaying, and in beneficent magic. This let her behave as she chose – faring off by herself, clad like a mainlander
man – without unduly shocking respectable folk; but it did not consecrate her.

Yet a wise-woman must needs be close to the divine; and Erissa had taken the lead in restoring certain forms of worship among
the Malathians; and she had herself, when a maiden, danced with the bulls for Our Lady; and, while she made no point of having
once been chosen by a god, neither did she make any bones about it, and most people believed her. Thus she was no common witch.

The awe of her, waxing over the years, helped Dagonas in his business. Erissa grinned.

Her muscles flexed and eased, flexed and eased, driving her always further inland and upward. Before long she was in ancient
pine forest. At that height, under those scented boughs, the coolness of autumn began to grow chilly. She took her noontide
meal beside a rushing brook. It widened into a pool where she could have handcaught a fish to eat raw, were she not bound
for a shrine of the Goddess and therefore prohibited from killing.

She reached her goal at dusk: a cave high in the highest mountain on Malath. In a hut nearby dwelt the sibyl. Erissa made
her offering, a pendant of Northland amber which enclosed for eternity a beetle. The Egyptian sign being very potent, that
was a valuable donation. Hence the sibyl not only gave Erissa routine leave to pray before the three images at the front of
the cave – Britomartis the Maiden, Rhea the Mother, Dictynna the Rememberer and Foreseer – but led her past the curtain to
the spring and its Mystery.

The hut was well stocked with food brought up by country-fok. After they had eaten, the sibyl wanted to gossip, but Erissa
was in no mood for it and, because she too had powers, could scarcely be compelled. They went early to bed.

—Erissa was likewise up betimes, and on the mountaintop shortly after daybreak.

Here, alone in stillness and splendor, she could let go her tears.

Beneath her the slopes fell away in crags, cliffs, boulders, stone strong and dark against the green of pines, which finally
gave place to the many-hued fields and orchards of men. Overhead the sky soared altogether clear, holding an eagle whose wings
sheened gold in the young light of Asterion, the sun, the Son. The air was cool, pungent with sage and thyme, and cast a breeze
to lift the hair off a wet brow. Around the island reached the sea, blue and green shading afar to purple, streaked with a
dazzlement of foam. Northwestward, fellow islands stood like white-hulled ships; northward reared Asia, still hazy with night
dreams. But southward hung the peak of Mount Ida, where Asterion was born, upon Keft the lovely and forever lost.

There was no sign of Kharia-ti-yeh. There would never be again in the world.

‘God Duncan,’ Erissa wept, raising to heaven a hand that gripped a piece of earth, ‘when will you call me back to you?’

And the vortex took her.

They stood in a land that the sun had burnt barren. On brown rock-strewn ground, scored by gullies, grew scattered thorn-bushes.
Heat shimmers danced on the southern horizon. To north the desert met waters that shone like whetted metal beneath an unmerciful
glare and three wheeling vultures.

They looked upon the land and upon each other. They screamed.

In the instant beyond time when he was seized and borne off, Reid’s terror cried out: Oh, no! Not a stroke this soon in my
life! Then he stumbled back from the desolation that filled eyes, ears, lungs; but it was everywhere around him, it had him.
The words flashed through: I’m dreaming. I’m delirious. I’m dead and in hell.

A wind boomed, mummy-dry, furnace-hot, hissing with grit that whipped his skin.

The voices pierced his own and brought him jerkily about. Three! A yellow-bearded man in spike-topped helmet and chainmail;
a short, leather-coated, fur-capped rider on a rearing pony; a tall, slender woman in a knee-length white dress. And Duncan
Reid. They shuddered, twenty or thirty feet apart and equally distant from the thing that lay motionless.

Thing … a tapered cylindroid, ten yards long by four yards maximum radius or thereabouts, coppery-shining and featureless.
Or was it? An iridescent shimmer played in the air immediately over the surface, making the very shape impossible to tell
with certainty.

The horseman got his mount under control. At once he snatched a double-curved bow that hung at his saddle, an arrow from the
quiver beside, and had the weapon strung and armed. The blond man roared and lifted an ax. The woman drew a knife of reddish
metal. Reid struggled to wake from this nightmare. A fraction of him noticed how his legs tensed to run.

But then the woman’s frantically flickering glance reached him. She uttered a new shriek, not of terror but – what? – and
dropped her blade and sped toward him.

‘Hey!’ Reid heard himself croak, weakly and ridiculously. ‘I don’t know – who are you? Where are we?’

She reached him, she flung arms about him, her mouth met his in a fierceness to break lips open against teeth. He lurched,
almost falling. Her tears washed away the blood and trickled saltily onto his tongue. She kept sobbing words he could not
follow except that he thought his name was among them, which was the final insanity. After a moment, when he had not
returned her embrace or her kiss, she went to her knees. Her hair, fallen loose from a knot, hid her lowered countenance in
midnight waves.

Reid gaped toward the others. They stared back. The sight of him and her thus together must have eased them the least bit,
made them suppose this might not be a death trap. The bearded man lowered his ax, the rider stopped pointing his arrow at
anyone in particular.

Silence, except for the wind and the weeping.

Reid drew three deep breaths. His pulse still racketed but was slowing; he no longer trembled. And he could think. That alone
was a deliverance.

His senses had become preternaturally keen in the unknownness that poured through them. His cooling brain began to catalogue
the data. Dry heat; sun high in a cloudless brazen vault; baked soil where a few scrubby bushes and tufts of harsh grass survived;
blowing dust; not far away, a sea or giant lake. Every detail was strange to him, but every detail was there.

The same was true of the woman at his feet. He saw that her garment appeared to be homespun and that its blue border appeared
to be vegetable dye. He saw that her sandals were stitched and had nothing but leather in them, being secured by straps tied
halfway up the calf. He saw the smears of local dirt, and traces of older stains that any commercial bleach ought to have
removed. She clasped his shoes. He felt the touch and noticed that her hands and feet were large but beautifully shaped, that
the nails were pared short and carried no sign of polish, that her left wrist bore a wide silver bracelet studded with turquoises
which was not Navajo work.

He could recall no dream so complete, dustgrain by dust-grain. And things held steady. He returned his gaze to a tussock and
it had not become a toadstool. Events weren’t telescoped, either; they happened second by second, each instant a logical continuation
of the last.

Real time?

Could you dream you were dreaming a real-time dream?

Whatever was happening, he didn’t see how he could lose by doing what was rational. He lifted his hands, palms outward, and
forced himself to smile at the two men.

The fellow in armor did not exactly reply in kind, but he scowled less hard and walked closer. He held his ax slantwise
before him, gauntleted hands well apart on the long shaft. When he halted, a couple of yards from Reid, he stood with knees
slightly bent and feet at right angles. The architect thought: He’s not an actor. He knows how to use that thing. Otherwise
he’d take a woodchopper stance, like me before I saw his. And his weapon’s been in service, too – that nick in the edge, that
scratch in the blade.

Where have I seen this kind of battle ax before?

A chill flew up and down his spine; Axes quite like it on the Bayeux Tapestry, carried by the English at Hastings.

The man growled what must be a string of questions. His language was as alien as the woman’s – no, not quite; it had a spooky
half-familiarity, must be related to one Reid had heard in foreign movies or while serving his hitch in Europe. The man made
a truculent jerk of his head back toward the coppery object.

Reid’s mouth was too parched for him to talk other than huskily: ‘Sorry. I… I’m a stranger here myself. Do you speak English?
Parlez-vous français? ¿Habla usted español? Sprechen sie Deutsch?’
Those were the tongues in which he had a few phrases. They got no response.

However, the man seemed to understand that Reid too was a victim. He slapped his broad chest and said, ‘Oleg Vladimirovitch
Novgorodna.’ After several repetitions, Reid caught the syllables.

It rocked him.
‘R-r-russki?’
he stammered. Again persistence was needed to get past the barriers of accent.

Oleg nodded. ‘Da,
ya yest Novgorodni. Podvlastni Knyaza Yaroslava.
’

Reid shook his head, baffled.
‘Sovietski?
’ he ventured. Oleg tried to answer and gave up. Reid stooped past the woman, who had assumed a watchful crouch, and drew
in the sand
CCCP.
He threw Oleg an inquiring lift of eyebrows. Everybody knew that much Cyrillic; it answered to USSR, and the Soviets claimed
nearly one hundred percent literacy. But Oleg shrugged and flung his arms wide in a purely Slavic gesture.

The American rose. They peered at each other.

Oleg’s outfit had beer too strange for the human to show through until now. His helmet, conical and rising in a spike, sat
atop a padded cloth coif on which, between rim and shoulders, were sewn small rings. The sleeveless hauberk was made of larger
rings, interlocked, falling almost to the knees. It like-wise
had a quilted undergarment, above a white linen shirt. That must be murderous here; the black iron was wet with the perspiration
that ran off its wearer. At a brass-buckled belt were fastened a dagger and a leather purse. Trousers of coarse blue linen
were tucked into gaily red and green boots. The gauntlets were leather too, strips of brass riveted on their backs.

The man looked thirtyish, about five feet seven or eight, tremendously wide and muscular. A slight paunch and jowliness didn’t
lower the impression of bear strength. His head and face were round, snub-nosed, mustached, dense golden beard cropped under
the jaw. Against the redness of a skin long exposed to weather, beneath shaggy yellow brows, his eyes were china blue.

‘You… seem to be… a decent guy,’ Reid said, knowing how foolish he was.

Oleg pointed at him, obviously demanding his name. The recollection of his chat with engineer Stockton – Christ almighty,
half an hour ago in the middle of an ocean! – smote Reid like a physical blow. He staggered. The world spun around him. ‘Duncan,’
he mumbled.

‘Duncan!’ The woman leaped up and sprang to him. He leaned on her till things steadied. ‘Duncan,’ she crooned, half laughing,
half crying,
‘ka ankhash
Duncan.’

A shadow fell across them. Oleg bounced into battle posture. The horseman had joined their group. His bow was taut and his
expression mean.