Poul Anderson - The Dancer from Atlantis

“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 saffron, 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. ft 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 demonstrat ing 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 god.”

“But—but—” Reid waved helplessly at the mental 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?”