Poul Anderson - The Dancer from Atlantis

“Well, turn your eyes, then, wench, till I’ve waded out decently deep,” Oleg huffed.

Once laved and cooled, they felt better. Even the thirst was easier to bean Oleg grudgingly imitated Erissa in following Reid’s advice about sipping from the sea. “I don’t believe, mind you,” he said. “It’ll kill us off faster in the end. But if we can keep going thus for a while, a bit, stronger than otherwise, maybe the saints can find help to send us. You hear me?” he shouted at the sky. “A golden chalice set with precious stones for the Church of St. Boris. Six altar cloths of the finest silk, and scores of pearls sewn on, for St. Mary.” He paused. “I’d best say that in Russian and Romaic too. And, oh, yes, Norse.”

Reid couldn’t resist japing: “Your saints have not been born.” Oleg looked stricken. The American added hastily, “Well, I could be wrong, I suppose?’ No sense in pointing out that Christ—that Abraham, most likely—was also in the future.

He turned to Erissa. “Sleep has cleared my head,” he went on. “Let me think hard about what we know.” And let me stop being so damned aware of what I glimpse of you through the water, his mind added guiltily.

He made careful inquiries of them both, pausing for long times to ponder. They regarded him with respect. Uldin hadn’t shown that; but he had barked curt answers to a few key questions before he left.

Oleg proved a diamond mine of information. Reid decided that the Russian’s bluff manner must be in a large part a disarming mask over a sophisticated intelligence. The Kievan state was not the slum that most of its Western contemporaries were. Eight million people dwelt in a territory as big as the United States east of the Mississippi, a realm stuffed with natural resources cannily exploited. Trade with the Byzantines was steady and heavy, bringing back not just their goods but their arts and ideas. The Russian upper classes, more capitalists than noblemen, were literate, au courant with events abroad as well as at home: they lived in houses equipped with stoves and window glass; they ate with gold and silver spoons, off plates set on sumptuous tablecloths, the meals including delicacies like oranges, lemons, and sugar, dogs, never allowed indoors, had shelters of their own, and customarily a Hungarian groom to care for them and the horses; Kiev in particular was a cosmopolitan home for a dozen different nationalities; the monarchy was not despotic. rather the system granted so much freedom that popular assemblies, in Novgorod especially, often turned into brawls

The point was that Oleg could place himself exactly in space and time: the eastward bend of the Dnieper, early June, 1050 A.D.

Uldin, vaguer, had spoken of recently taking over the land of the East Goths, after having first crushed the Alans, and of greedy speculations about the Roman Empire to the west. From his dippings into history (thank fortune for a good memory!) Reid could delimit the Hun’s scene of departure: the Ukraine, one or two hundred miles from the Crimea in a more or less northwesterly direction; time, the later fourth century A.D.

Erissa posed the trickiest problem, for all her eager cooperation. The name of the island whence she had been seized, Malath, was that bestowed by its largely Keftiu inhabitants. The English equivalent did not automatically come to Reid, any more than he would have known Christiana and Oslo were identical if he had not been so informed.

He set aside the riddle of her former home, Atlantis. A continent that sank? Pure myth; geological impossibility, in any period less than millions of years. And yet the name as used by her bore such a freight of the same meaning, the fair and happy realm which the sea took back unto itself, that it had come through the helmet as more than a label.... Well, she said her Atlantis was gone. Where had she lived afterward? Might a clue be found in what that other folk whose language she also knew called the place?

“Hrodos,” 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 Achaians 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 wass 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 steamed 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.”