Poul Anderson - The Dancer from Atlantis

“Will you keep us here sweltering the whole day, till the tribesmen arrive?” Uldin yelled.

“Calm down,” Oleg told him. He studied Dimes, his mien as pawky as the, Achaean’s. “It’s true we’ll cause you extra trouble, Captain,” he murmured. “I’m sorry for that. But might you accept—a gift between gentlemen, naturally, a slight repayment for your noble generosity when you broached yon water cask for us—would you allow me to show you, as well as your king, that we’re not beggars?”

He had dipped into his purse while he talked. The gold coins flashed for half a second before Diores’ deft fingers closed on them.

“Plain to see, you’re folk of good breeding,” the Achaean said blandly, “and that alone obliges me to help you in any way I can. Do come aboard. Do. The horse—sir, if you’ll agree to sacrifice your horse here on this shore for a safe voyage, you can have your pick out of my own herd when we arrive. That I swear.”

Uldin muttered but gave in. Diores made a welcoming gesture at his ship.

“Rhodes first,” Erissa said. Ecstasy flooded from her. “Duncan, Duncan, you’ll see our sort”

Reid’s stupefaction and her joy were cut off by Diores: “I’m afraid not. I am on a mission for Prince Theseus, and can’t go out of my way. The only reason we came this far west after leaving the Nile Delta was—”

“Fear of the pirates in the Aegean islands,” she said bitterly.

“What? Pirates? Has the sun addled your wits? No disrespect milady. I know how high womenfolk rank among the Cretans, and you must have been a, sacred bull dancer when young, right? Nothing else would explain that carriage of yours. Ah, yes. But as for pirates, no, never, d’you think we’re in Tyrrhenian waters? It’s simply that, with the wind as is I gauge our best course is around the west end of Crete and then slide along past the Peloponnesus to Athens. You can take passage thence for Rhodes, next spring at latest.”

In her disappointment she was not mollified. “You speak as if the Minos and his navy still kept the peace of the sea for honest folk.” Venom edged her voice.

“I do believe you should go aboard and rest, my lady, out of the sun.” Diores’ geniality stayed unbroken. “Last time I called at Knossos, and that was outbound on this trip to leave off some cargo, hardly a month back, the Minos sat in the Labyrinth and his customs officers were fattening on his tithe same as always.”

She whitened.

“Worse luck,” growled a subordinate officer. “How long, Father Zeus, must we bear his yoke?” His friends looked equally angered.

At first shipboard was paradise. Reid, stunned by an avalanche of experiences and impressions like none he had imagined—for no historical novelist could give him the total reality—needed day and night and part of the day that followed to see that shipboard was, in fact, only the absence of hell.

Fed (salt beef, leeks, coarse black bread, mixed wine and water), cooled by a breeze that ruffled his hair, beneath a soft clear sky, amidst the sun’s million sparks flung off a thousand shades of deep, moving, snowy-foamed blue: he sat by a rail and remembered Homer’s line about the multitudinous laughter of the waves. They were smaller than on the ocean, friskier, very close to him as they passed beneath the low gunwale. He could see each ripple and swirl; he marveled anew at how intricate, ever-changing a piece of art was a wave.

The ship plowed forward, a bone in her teeth and wake whirling aft. The decks rocked in a long rhythm, timbers creaked, stays hummed, sometimes a sheet would go snap and the sail thutter to a change of wind or sea. The air, mild and lively, was rich with odors of sun-baked pitch, ozone, saltiness. On the poop the quartermasters—a craft this size had both port and starboard steering oars—stood watch like young gods.

The rest of the crew sat at ease when they were not sprawled under the thwarts for a nap (nude, using the tunic for a pillow, but generally rolled in a sheepskin blanket). Quarters were cramped. However, no trip involved more than a few days continuously afloat; as a rule, vessels hugged the coasts and their crews camped ashore every night.

The men’s eyes kept straying toward the passengers, half curious, half fearful. Who knew what these strangers were? It took a while before any save Diores and his noblemen ventured to say any word beyond a muttered greeting. The sailors talked low-toned among each other, they fiddled at small chores, they made furtive signs which Reid had seen while he traveled about in Mediterranean parts on leave from the Army, thousands of years from now

No matter. They’d get over their shyness when nothing terrible happened. And he was bound for Athens!

Not the Athens he’d loved, he reminded himself. The temples on the Acropolis, the Tower of the Winds, the columns of Olympian Zeus—tiny friendly cafés, their dolmades and tourko and ouzo, smart shops, insane—taxi drivers, old women in black, vendors of hard-roasted corn on the cob, cheerful men who all seem to have cousins in Brooklyn—forget them, because you dare not remember. Forget, too, Aristotle, Pericles, Aeschylus, the victory at Marathon, the siege of Troy, Homer himself. None of it exists, unless perhaps a few tribal chants have lines that will someday be preserved in an epic and thus endure after their makers are millennial dust. Everything else is a ghost, no, less than a ghost, a vision, a fading dream.

You’re bound for the Athens of Prince Theseus.

That much will last to your day. You’ll be thrilled in your boyhood to read how a hero named Theseus slew the gruesome Minotaur

A shadow fell across him.

—the Minotaur which Erissa served.

She joined him, ignoring the crewmen who, crowded back to leave them alone on this bench, kept looking and looking. A borrowed cloak was fastened, not over the shoulders of her tunic but about her waist to form a skirt.

“Why?” Reid asked, pointing at the garment.

She shrugged. “Best I muffle myself like an Achaean woman.” The Keftiu words fell flatly out of her mouth. She stared at the horizon.

“Isn’t this wonderful?” he said, trying clumsily to hearten her. “I can understand why Aphrodite was born from the sea foam.”

“What?” Her eyes, turned the hue of dull jade, swung to him. “What do you speak of?”

“Why, why don’t the Achaeans,” he stammered, “don’t they believe the goddess of ... love ... rose from the sea off Cyprus?”

She sneered. “Aphrodite, cow-teated, barrel-buttocked, the bitch forever in heat?”

• Reid cast an alarmed glance past her. Probably quite a few of those men had a working knowledge of Cretan. Nobody seemed to have heard, though, through the singing air.

“The Goddess, yes, in Her form of Britornartis the Maiden, She arose thus,” Erissa said.

He thought: I suppose the Achaeans kept—will keep—the beautiful myth, giving it to what’s now a primitive fertility figure ... after Crete has been overthrown.

Erissa’s fist smote the rail. “The sea is Hers—and ours!” she cried. “What spell made you forget, Duncan?”

“I tell you, I’m a mortal man, more lost than you are,” he said desperately. “I’m trying to find out what’s happened to us, You’ve gone backward in time yourself, and—”

“Hush.” Self-controlled again, she laid a hand on his arm and whispered: “Not here. Later, as soon as may be, but not here. That Diores isn’t the yokel he pretends. He watches, listens, probes. And he is the enemy.”

Traffic was thinning out as stormy autumn approached, but they spoke to two other ships on their first afternoon. One, rowing into the wind, was a Keftiu-owned freighter, though its crew seemed to be drawn from the whole eastern Mediterranean, bound from Pylos with hides which ought to fetch a goodly amount of timber in Lebanon. The skipper expected to take the wood on to Egypt and swap it for glassware before returning to his home port on Naxos for a season’s ease. Diores explained that such runs had become profitable again since Pharaoh Amenhotep pacified his Syrian province. The other and larger vessel boomed straight toward Avaris, carrying British tin. Its men were still more mixed, including some who, glimpsed across unrestful scores of yards, appeared to be North European recruits. The world today was astonishingly more cosmopolitan than it would be later on in history.