Poul Anderson - The Dancer from Atlantis

It better not be. If it is, we’ll likely be discovered and killed. I’d never have dared this foray if I didn’t believe it was fated that we rescue the dancer and afterward lose her.

He glanced at Erissa. In the failing light, silhouetted against a half-crumbled wall, she went striding as if to her bulls. The cameo profile was held so steady that he could almost have called her expression serene. He thought: She would dare.

The road wound inland for a steep two or three miles. Above the reach of the tsunamis, most of the poplars that lined the way still stood, though some were uprooted and gale-broken boughs were strew about. Behind these trees, on either side, had been the cottages of smallholders, the villas of the wealthy; but they lay in rubble. A stray cow wandered lowing—for her calf? Reid couldn’t make out anything else. But dusk was upon him and vision didn’t reach far.

It did find Knossos, whose death flickered red and yellow across the clouds ahead. At last the fires themselves came into sight, scores leaping above a black jaggedness of cast-down walls. When a roof fell in, sparks spouted as if from a volcano. The roaring grew ever louder, the reek and sting of smoke sharper, as Reid’s band trudged on.

Knossos had not been defended. What need had the sea king’s people for fortifications ashore? Where a gate would elsewhere have risen, the road branched off in several wide, flagged streets. The city had been a larger version of Atlantis. Erissa pointed her spear down one of the avenues. t’That way,” she said tonelessly.

Full night had come. Reid groped along by flame-light, stumbling on fallen blocks and baulks, once in a while putting his foot on what he suddenly knew for a dead body. Through the crackling he heard occasional screams. He squinted into the roil of smoke but saw no one except a woman who sat in a doorway and rocked herself. She did not look back at him, she looked through him. The man beside her had been killed by a weapon. Soot and dust rained steadily upon her.

Dagonas stopped. “Quick! Aside!” he hissed. A second later they heard what his young ears had: tramping feet, clanking metal. Crouched in the shadows of a narrow side street, they saw an Achaean squad go past. Only two men were in full gear—nodding plumes, shining helmets, blowing cloaks, armor, shields—that must have been smuggled along. The rest, numbering seven, were clad in ordinary wise and carried merely swords, pikes. axes, a sling. Two were Cretan.

“By Asterice—those traitors—!” Ashkel’s blade caught the light in a gleam. Two comrades wrestled him to a halt before he could charge. The gang went past.

“We’ll scarcely meet more,” Erissa said.—Theseus doesn’t have many here on his side. It’s only that none are left to fight on ours. Those who might have rallied them, the nobles, were of course seized or slain immediately; and leaderless men can do nothing except run.” She started off afresh.

They met more dead, more grieving. Hurt folk croaked for help, for water; hardest was the necessity to pass them by without answering. Or was the worst those glimpsed forms that scuttled out of sight—Cretans who feared this party was also among the looters, rapers, and slave takers?

When they came to, a certain square, Erissa halted. “My home.” Her voice was no longer entirely steady.

Most of the buildings around had escaped extreme damage. The wavering hazy light of a fire some distance off showed cracked facades, sagging doors, wall paintings blurred by dust; but they stood. On the one at which she pointed, Reid could just make out that there had been depicted, triumphal in a field of lilies, the bull dance.

She caught his hand. They crossed the plaza.

Night gaped in the house. After knocking with his spear butt, peering inside at stripped and tumbled emptiness, Reid said slowly: “I’m afraid no one here. Looks as if it’s been plundered. I suppose the folk fled.”

“Where?” Dagonas’ voice was raw.

“Oh, I can tell you, I can tell you, friends.” The answer drifted from within. “Wait and I’ll tell you. Shared sorrow is best:”

The man who shuffled out was wrinkled, bald, blinking from half-blind eyes. Erissa choked, “Balon.”

“Aye, aye, you know Balon, do you?” he said. “Old Balon, too old to be worth hauling off and selling—they pensioned him in this family, though, they did, because he worked faithfully over the years for a good master, yes, that I did. Why, the children used to come and beg me for a story.... All gone. All gone.”

She dropped her spear and pulled him to her. “Balon, old dear,” she said raggedly, “do you remember Erissa?”

“That I do, that I do, and will for what days remain to me. I hope he’ll not be too unkind to her. She might charm her way into his graces, you know. She could charm the birds down out of the trees. But I don’t know, I don’t know. They said something about him and the Ariadne, when they came for her”

“For who?” Dagonas yelled.

“Why, Erissa. Right after the quake and the darkness and winds, almost. She’d been telling about this man she met on Atlantis—you could warm your hands at her happiness and then the quake and—her father’s been ill, you know. Pains in the chest. Weak. He couldn’t well move. So she stayed. Then, crash, there they were at the door. They’d been sent special. Theseus, they said, wanted Erissa. They wanted loot and slaves. They got both, after they’d bound my little Erissa who was going to win the garland and marry that foreign man she loved. But not old Balon. Nor his master. Master died, he did, right then and there, when that Achaean tramped into the bedroom and grabbed mistress—said she wouldn’t fetch much but looked like she had a few years of grain-grinding in her—yes, master’s dead in there. I laid him out. Now I’m waiting to follow him. I’d have followed the rest of the family, I begged they’d take me along, but the soldiers laughed. So all poor Baton can do is wait by master’s bedside.”

Erissa shook him. “Where are they?” she cried.

“Oh? Oh?” The servant squinted. “You look like her. You really do,” he mumbled. “But you can’t, be kinfolk.

Can you? I knew this whole house, I did. Every member, every cousin and nephew and baby in the Thalassocracy. They’d always tell old Balon the news when they came visiting here, and I’d always remember.... They’re in some pen or other, I guess, under heavy guard. You’ll not rescue them, I fear.”

“Erissa!” Reid demanded. “Her too?”

“No. No. I told you. Didn’t I? Something, special about her, Theseus, our conqueror, that is, King Theseus wanted her special. He sent men after her right away, before she might escape. They’d had to fight on the way here, they told me; I saw blood on them; that’s the kind of hurry they were in. I don’t know why. The rest of the household, brothers, sisters, children, servants, they just collected incidental-like, along with the loot. Erissa was what they really came for. I suppose she’s in the Labyrinth. Now can I go back to master?”

Mount Iouktas, where Asterion was buried, in whose cave shrine Lydra had had her , bulked ebon across the clouds. Approaching from above—the least unsafe, when every path was beset—Reid could make out the palace against the burning further down; cyclopean walls, high pillars, broad staircases, sprawling over acres, grand even when half shattered. A few watchfires glowed red in courtyards.

“We’re out of our minds,” Uldin grumbled. “Heading into a wolf’s den, a maze where we could wander lost till dawn.”

“Blood brotherhood,” Erissa answered. Since Balon refused to seek the galley, she had masked herself; she moved with fluid swiftness as before, but face and voice might have belonged to brazen Talos whom legend said once guarded Crete. “I remember those halls. We should be able to get around in them better than the enemy.”