Poul Anderson - The Dancer from Atlantis

They looked upon the land and upon each other. They screamed.

In the instant beyond time when he was seized and borne off, Reid’s terror cried out: Oh, no! Not a stroke this soon in my life! ‘Then he tumbled back from the desolation that filled eyes, ears, lungs; but it was everywhere around him, it had him. The words flashed through: I’m dreaming. I’m delirious. I’m dead and in hell.

A wind boomed, mummy-dry furnace-hot, hissing with grit that whipped his skin.

The voices pierced his own and brought him jerkily about. Three! A yellow-bearded man in spike-topped helmet and chainmail; a short, leather-coated, fur-capped rider on a rearing pony; a tall, slender, woman in a knee-length white dress. And Duncan Reid. They shuddered, twenty or thirty feet apart and equally distant from the thing that, lay motionless.

Thing ... a tapered cylindroid, ten yards long by four yards maximum radius or thereabouts, coppery-shining and featureless. Or was it? An iridescent shimmer played in the air immediately over the surface, making the very shape impossible to tell with certainty.

The horseman got his mount under control. At once he snatched a double-curved bow that hung at his saddle, an arrow from the quiver beside, and had the weapon strung and armed. The blond man roared and lifted an ax. The woman drew a knife of reddish metal. Reid struggled to wake from this nightmare. A fraction of him noticed how his legs tensed to run.

But then the woman’s frantically flickering glance reached him. She uttered a new shriek, not of terror but what?—and dropped her blade and sped toward him.

“Hey!” Reid heard himself croak, weakly and ridiculously. “I, I don’t know—who are you? Where are we?”

She reached him, she flung arms about him, her mouth met his in a fierceness to break lips open against teeth. He lurched, almost falling. Her tears washed away the blood and trickled saltily onto his tongue. She kept sobbing words he could not follow except that he thought his name was among them, which was the final insanity. After a moment, when he had not returned her embrace or her kiss, she went to her knees. Her hair, fallen loose from a knot, hid her lowered countenance in midnight waves.

Reid gaped toward the others. They stared back. The sight of him and her thus together must have eased them the least bit, made them suppose this might not be a death trap. The bearded man lowered his ax, the rider stopped pointing his arrow at anyone in particular.

Silence, except for the wind and the weeping.

Reid drew three deep breaths. His pulse still racketed but was slowing; he no longer trembled. And he could think. That alone was a deliverance.

His’ senses had become preternaturally keen in the unknownness that poured through them. His cooling brain began to catalogue the data Dry heat; sun high in a cloudless brazen vault; baked soil where a few scrubby bushes and tufts, of harsh grass survived; blowing dust; not far away, a sea or giant lake. Every detail was strange to him, but every detail was there.

The same was true of the woman at his feet. He saw that her garment appeared to be homespun and that its blue border appeared to be vegetable dye. He saw that her sandals were stitched and had nothing but leather in them, being secured by straps tied halfway up the calf. He saw the smears of local dirt, and traces of older stains that any commercial bleach ought to have removed. She clasped his shoes. He felt the touch and noticed that her hands and feet were large but beautifully shaped, that the nails were pared short and carried no sign of polish, that her left wrist bore a wide silver bracelet studded with turquoises which was not Navajo work.

He could recall no dream so complete, dustgrain by dustgrain. And things held steady. He returned his gaze to a tussock and it had not become a toadstool. Events weren’t telescoped, either; they happened second by second, each instant a logical continuation of the last Real time?

Could you dream you were dreaming a real-time dream?

Whatever was happening, he didn’t see how he could lose by doing what was rational. He lifted his hands, palms outward, and forced himself to smile at the two men.

The fellow in armor did not exactly reply in kind, but he scowled less hard and walked closer. He held his ax, slant-wise before him, gauntleted hands well apart on the long shaft. When he halted, a couple of yards from Reid, he stood with knees slightly bent and feet at right angles. The architect thought: He’s not an actor. He knows how to use that thing. Otherwise he’d take a woodchopper stance, like me before I saw his. And his weapon’s been in service, too—that nick in the edge, that scratch in the blade.

Where have I seen this kind of battle ax before?

A chill flew up and down his spine; Axes quite like it on, the Bayeux Tapestry, carried by the English at Hastings.

The man growled what must be a string of questions. His language was as alien as the woman’s—no, not quite; it had a spooky, half-familiarity, must be related to one Reid had heard in foreign movies or while serving his hitch in Europe. The man made a truculent jerk of his head back toward the coppery object.

Reid’s mouth was too parched for him to talk other than huskily: “Sorry. I ... I’m a stranger here myself. Do you speak English? Parlez-vous français? ¿Habla usted español? Sprechen sie Deutsch?” Those were the tongues in which he had a few phrases. They got no response.

However, the man seemed to understand that Reid too was a victim. He slapped his broad chest and said, “Oleg Vladimirovitch Novgorodna.” After several repetitions, Reid caught the syllables.

It rocked him. “R-r-russki?” he stammered. Again persistence was needed to get past the barriers of accent.

Oleg nodded. “Da, ya yest Novgorodni. Podvlastni Knyaza Yaroslava.”

Reid shook his head, baffled. “Sovietski?” he ventured. Oleg tried to answer and gave up. Reid stooped past the woman, who had assumed a watchful crouch, and drew in the sand CCCP. He threw Oleg an inquiring lift of eyebrows. Everybody knew that much Cyrillic; it answered to USSR, and the Soviets claimed nearly one hundred percent literacy. But Oleg shrugged and flung his arms wide in a purely Slavic gesture.

The American rose. They peered at each other.

Oleg’s outfit had been too strange for the human to show through until now. His helmet, conical and rising in a spike, sat atop a padded cloth coif on which, between rim and shoulders, were sewn small rings. The sleeveless hauberk was made of larger rings, interlocked, falling almost to the knees. It likewise had a quilted undergarment, above a white linen shirt. That must be murderous here; the black iron was wet with the perspiration that ran off its wearer. At a brass-buckled belt were fastened a dagger and a leather purse. Trousers of coarse blue linen were tucked into gaily red and green boots. The gauntlets were leather too, strips of brass riveted on their backs.

The man looked thirtyish, about five feet seven or eight, tremendously wide and muscular. A slight paunch and jowliness didn’t lower the impression of bear strength. His head and face were round, snub-nosed, mustached, dense golden beard cropped under the jaw. Against the redness of a skin long exposed to weather, beneath shaggy yellow brows, his eyes were china blue.

“You ... seem to be ... a decent guy,” Reid said, knowing how foolish he was.

Oleg pointed at him, obviously demanding his name. The recollection of his chat with engineer Stockton—Christ almighty, half an hour ago in the middle of an ocean!—smote Reid like a physical blow. He staggered. The world spun around him. “Duncan,” he mumbled.