Poul Anderson - The Dancer from Atlantis

Reid gripped the cup till his fingers hurt. “Your Atlantis,” he said, “is that not a volcanic island about sixty miles north of Crete?”

“Yes. I believe the smoke rising from the mountain, as it often does, brought about the name ‘Land of the Pillar.’ Atlantis is the seat of the Ariadne, who reigns over rites and votaries throughout the realm even as the Minos reigns over worldly affairs.”

Ariadne? Not a name, as myth was to make it, but a title: “Most Sacred One.”

“I know Atlantis will sink in fire, ash, storm, and destruction,” Erissa said.

“Then you know everything I do, or nearly,” Reid answered in wretchedness. “My age had nothing but shards. It happened too long ago.”

He had read a few popular accounts of the theorizing and excavating that had begun in earnest in his own day. A cluster of islands, Thera and its still tinier companions, the Santorini group, had looked insignificant except for being remnants left by an eruption that once dwarfed Krakatoa. But lately several scientists—yes, Anghelos Galanopoulos in the lead—had started wondering. If you reconstructed the single original island, you got “a picture oddly suggestive of the capital of Atlantis as described by Plato; and ancient walls were known to be buried under the lava and cinders. That settlement might be better preserved than Pompeii, what parts had not vanished in the catastrophe.

To be sure, Plato could simply have been embellishing his discourses in the Timaios and the Kritias with a fiction. He had put his lost continent in midocean, impossibly big and impossibly far back if it was to have fought Athens. Yet there was some reason to believe he drew on a tradition, that half: memory of the Minoan empire which flickered through classical legend.

Assume his figures were in error. He claimed to derive the story from Solon, who had it from an Egyptian priest, who said he drew on records in another, older language. Translating from Egyptian to Greek numerals, you could easily get numbers above one hundred wrong by a factor of ten; and a timespan counted in months could be garbled into the same amount of years.

Plato was logically forced to move his Atlantis beyond the Pillars of Hercules. The Mediterranean didn’t have room for it. But take away the obviously invented hinterland. Shrink the city plan by one order of magnitude. The outline became not too different from that of Santorini. Change years to months. The date of Atlantis’ death shifted to between 1500 and 1300 B.C.

And this bestrode the 1400 B.C.—give or take a few decades—that archeologists assigned to the destruction of Knossos, the fall of the Thalassocracy.

Reid thought: I cannot tell her that I found what I read interesting, but not interesting enough to make me go there or even to read further.

“What are you talking about?” Uldin barked.

“We know the island will founder,” Reid told him. “That will be the most terrible thing ever to happen in this part of the world. A mountain will burst, stones and ashes rain from heaven, the darkness spread as far as Egypt The waves that are raised will sink the Cretan fleet; and Crete has no other defenses. Earthquakes will shake its cities apart. The Achaeans will be free to enter as conquerors?’

They pondered it, there in the curious peace of the sanctuary. Wind lulled, bees buzzed. Finally Oleg, eyes almost hidden beneath contracted yellow brows, asked, “Why won’t the Achaean ships be sunk too?”

“They’re further off,” Uldin guessed—

“No,” Erissa said. “Over the years I heard accounts. Vessels were swamped, flung ashore and smashed, and coasts flooded beneath a wall of water, along the whole Peloponnesus and the west coast of Asia. Not the, Athenian fleet, though. It was at sea and suffered little. Theseus boasted to the end of his life how Poseidon had fought for him.”

Reid nodded. He knew something about tsunamis. “The water rose beneath the hulls, but bore them while it did,” he said. “A wave like that is actually quite gentle at sea. imagine the Cretans were in harbor, or near the shores they were supposed to defend. Caught on the incoming billow, they were borne to land.”

“Like being in heavy surf.” Oleg shivered beneath the sun.

“A thousand times worse,” Reid said.

“When is this to happen?” Uldin asked.

“Early next year,” Erissa told him.

“She means in the springtime,” Reid explained, since Russia would use a different calendar from hers and the Huns, perhaps, none.

“Well,” Oleg said after a silence. “Well.”

He lumbered to the woman and awkwardly patted her shoulder. “I’m sorry for your folk,” he said. “Can nothing be done?”

“Who can stay the demons?” Uldin responded. Erissa was staring past them all.

“The Powers have been kind to us,” the Hun continued. “Here we are on the side that’ll win.”

“No!” flared Erissa. Fists clenched, she brought her eyes back to the men; the gaze burned. “It will not be. We can warn the Minos and the Ariadne. Let Atlantis and the coastal cities on Crete be evacuated. Let the fleet stand out to sea. And ... contrive to keep the cursed Athenian ships home. Then the realm will live.”

“Who’ll believe us?” Reid breathed.

“Can what is foredoomed be changed?” Oleg asked as softly and shakenly. His fingers flew, tracing crosses.

Uldin hunched his shoulders. “Should it be?” he demanded.

“What?” Reid asked in shock.

“What’s wrong with the Achaeans winning?” Uldin said. “They’re a healthy folk. And the Powers favor them. Who but a madman would fight against that?”

“Hold on,” Oleg said, deep in his throat. “You speak what could be dangerous.”

Erissa said, unperturbed, like embodied destiny, “We must try. We will try. I know:’ To Reid: “Before long, you will know too.”

“Anyhow,” the architect added, “Atlantis holds our only chance of ever getting home.”

Rain came that evening, racing before a gale. It hammered on walls, hissed down off roofs, gurgled among cobblestones. The wind hooted and rattled doors and shutters. Clay braziers within the hall could not drive out a dank chill, nor could lamps, torches, and hearthfire hold night far off. Shadows crouched on the rafters and jumped misshapen across the warriors who sat along the benches, mutedly talking, casting uneasy glances at the group around the thrones.

Aegeus huddled in a bearskin and hardly spoke. The royal word was given by Theseus, massive on his right, and Diores who stood on his left. Of those who confronted them, standing, Oleg and Uldin likewise kept silence.

Reid and Gathon had had no beforehand conference; they had barely met, when protocol demanded that the remarkable newcomers be presented to the Voice of the Minos; but the instant he trod through the door and took off his drenched cloak, the Cretan’s glance had met the American’s and they were allies.

“What business with me was too urgent to wait until morning?” Gathon inquired after the formalities.

He spoke politely but gave no deference, for he represented Aegeus’ overlord. Less than a viceroy, more than an ambassador, he observed, he reported to Knossos, he saw to it that the terms of Athenian vassalage were carried out. In looks he was purely Cretan: fine-featured, with large dark eyes, still slender in middle age. His curly black hair was banged across the forehead; two braids in front of the ears and carefully combed tresses behind fell halfway to his waist. As well as tweezers and a sickle-shaped bronze razor permitted, he was clean-shaven. More out of consideration for the weather than for mainland sensibilities, he had left the plain kilt of his people for an ankle-length pleated robe. The garment looked Egyptian; the lands of Pharaoh and Minos had long been closely tied.