Poul Anderson - The Dancer from Atlantis

Poised, the girl waited. She was clad like a boy for this, in nothing more than belt, kilt, and soft boots. Dark hair fell down her back in a ponytail lest a stray lock blind her. Reid’s nails dug into his palms.

Sunlight out of a wan sky flashed off tridents borne by the men on guard. In an emergency, they were supposed to rescue the dancers. They stood at ease just outside the rail fence. Reid couldn’t. Through the cool breeze, the hay and marjoram odors of Atlantis’ high meadows, he sensed his own sweat trickling, stinking, catching in his mustache and making his lips taste salty when he wet them.

That was Erissa waiting for those horns.

But she won’t be hurt, he told himself frantically. Not yet.

At his back the hills rolled downward, yellow grass, green bush, here and there a copse of gnarly trees, to a remote glimmer off the sea. Before him was the training field, and beyond that a slope more abrupt, and at its foot the city, the bay, the sacred isle,, and that other isle which, rising black from scintillant blueness, was the volcano. Above the crater stood a column of smoke so thick that the wind hardly bent its first thousand feet. Higher up it was scattered and blown south toward unseen Knossos.

The bull was almost upon the girl. Behind her a half-dozen companions wove a quick-footed pattern of dance.

Erissa sprang. Either hand seized a horn. The muscles played beneath her skin. Incredibly to Reid, she lifted herself, waved legs aloft, before she let go—and somersaulted down the great backbone, reached ground in an exuberant flip, and pranced her way back into the group. Another slender form was already on the horns.

“She’s good, that ‘un.” A guard nodded at Erissa, winked at Reid. “But she’ll take no priestess vows, I’ll bet. The man who beds her ‘ull have as much as he can handle—Hoy!” He leaped onto a rail, ready to jump the fence with his fellows. The bull had bellowed and tossed his head, flinging a girl aside.

Erissa ran to the beast, tugged an ear, and pirouetted off. He swerved toward her. She repeated her vault over him. The dance resumed, the guards relaxed.

.’Thought for a bit there he was turning mean, said the man who had earlier spoken. “But he just got excited. Happens.”

Reid let out a breath. His knees were about to give way. “Do ... you lose ... many people?” he whispered.

“No, very seldom, and those who’re gored often recover. That’s here on Atlantis, I mean. The boys train on Crete, and I’m told no few of them get hurt. Boys’re too reckless. They’re more interested in making a good show, winning glory for themselves, than in honoring the gods.

Girls, now, girls want the rite to go perfect for Her, so they pay close attention and follow the rules.”

The bull, which had been rushing at each one who separated herself from the group, slowed to a walk, then stopped. His flanks gleamed damp and his breath was loud. “That’ll do,” the ringmaster decided, waved his trident and shouted, “Everybody out!” To Reid he explained, “The nasty incidents are usually when the beast’s gotten tired. He doesn’t want to play any more, and if you force him, he’s apt to lose his temper. Or he may simply forget what he’s supposed to do.”

The girls scampered over the fence. The bull snorted. “Leave him a while to cool off, before you open the gate,” the ringmaster said. He cast a glance more appraising than appreciative over the bare young breasts and limbs, wet as the animal’s. “Enough for today, youngsters. Put your cloaks on so you don’t catch cold and go to the boat.”

They obeyed and departed, chattering and giggling like any lot of twelve—and thirteen-year-olds. They were no more than that, new recruits learning the art. The bull, however, was a veteran. You didn’t exercise together humans and beasts when neither knew what to expect.

And that, Reid thought, is the secret of the Minoan corrida. Nobody in my era, that I read about anyway, could figure out how it was possible. The answer looks obvious, now. You breed your cattle, not for slowness as Mary Renault suggested, but for intelligence; and you train them from calfhood.

Nonetheless it’s dangerous. A misstep, a flareup. They don’t accept every kid who wants fame and prizes and influence. No; bloodshed’s a bad omen. (Except the blood of the best animal, when he’s sacrificed after the games.) That must be the reason—beneath every religious rationalization—why the maidens aren’t allowed to dance when they’re having a period and why they have to stay maidens. Morning sickness would raise hell with an agility and coordination that would earn them black belts in any judo school at home, wouldn’t it? And there, in turn, we must have the reason why they train here, the youths on Crete. Put together a mixed lot of young, good-looking, physically perfect human beings—

Erissa nodded. “Well,” she, smiled, “did you enjoy watching?”

“It was, was unique in my life,” he stammered.

She halted before him. So far she had only flung her cloak across an arm. The ringmaster’s orders did not touch her, who, with long experience, had been the instructress. “I don’t want to go back to the isle right away,” she said. “The men can take the girls. You and I can borrow a shah lop later.” She drew the crow’s-wing queue off her bosom where it had gotten tossed. “After all, the Ariadne told me to show you about.”

“You are too kind.”

“No,, you are interesting.” He could not draw his eyes from her. Erissa, seventeen years old, colt-slim, unscarred by time or grief, loosening her hair.... Her smile faded. A slow flush descended from cheeks to breasts. She flung the wool cloak over her shoulders and pulled it around her. “Why do you stare?”

“I’m sorry,” Reid mumbled. “You’re, uh, the first real bull dancer I’ve met.”

“Oh.” She relaxed. “I’m nothing remarkable. Wait till we go to Knossos in spring and you see the festival:’ She pinned her mantle at the throat “Shall we walk?”

He fell into step beside her. “Do you, live here throughout every winter?” he asked, knowing the answer from her older self but feeling a need of staving off silence.

“Yes, to help train novices, and beasts, and myself after a summer’s ease. That’s spent in Knossos, mostly, or in a country villa we have. Sometimes we go elsewhere, though. My father’s a wealthy man, he owns several ships, and he’ll give us, his children, passage when a voyage is to a pleasant place.”

“M-m, how did he feel when you wanted to become a dancer?”

“I had to wheedle him a little. Mother made the real fuss. Not that parents can stop you from trying out. But I didn’t want to hurt them. I hadn’t gotten a real call, like the one that came to Ariadne Lydra. It just seemed exciting, glamorous—am I shocking you? Please don’t think I’m not happy to serve Our Lady and Asterion. But I wouldn’t want to become a priestess. I want lots of children. And, you know, a dancer meets practically every eligible bachelor in the Thalassocracy. With the honor she’ll bring to his house, she can pretty well choose any of them. Maybe this spring will be my last festival to dance in—” Her trilling stopped. She caught his hand. “Why, Duncan,, your mouth is all twisted up. You look ready to weep. What’s wrong?”

“Nothing,” he said harshly. “I remembered an old hurt.”

She continued hand in hand with him. No man on Atlantis would dare take advantage of her, he thought. The paddock was lost to view as their trail wound downward over the hills. Grass and brush stirred, trees soughed in the wind. He could smell her flesh, still warm from exertion, warm as the sunlight on his back or the fingers that curled around his.