Three wings ran from the hall. One was for utility and servitors’ quarters, one for the royal family and its permanent freeborn attendants, one for guests. The rooms, fronting on a corridor, were cubicles, their doorways closed merely by drapes. However, those drapes were thick and lavishly patterned; the plaster walls were ornamented with more tapestries; the bedsteads were heaped with sheepskins and furs above the straw; next to rhytons stood generous containers of wine as well as water; and in each compartment a girl made timid obeisance.
Oleg clapped his hands. ‘Oh, ho!’ he chortled. ‘I like this place!’
‘If we never get back,’ Uldin agreed, ‘we could do far worse than become Aegeus’ men.’
The chamberlain indicated a room for Erissa. ‘Uh, she and I are together,’ Reid said. ‘One servant will be ample.’
The other man leered. ‘You get one apiece, master. So ’twas commanded. They can share the extra room. We’ve not much company, what with harvest season ashore and fall weather afloat.’ He was a bald-headed Illyrian with the perkiness of any old retainer. – No, Reid thought suddenly. He’s a slave. He behaves like a lifer who’s at last become a trusty in his prison.
The girls said they would fetch the promised garments. Was food desired? Did our lord and lady wish to be taken to the bathhouse, scrubbed, massaged, and rubbed with olive oil by their humble attendants?
‘Later,’ Erissa said. ‘In time to have us ready for the king’s feast – and the queen’s.’ she added, for Achaean women did not dine formally with men. ‘First we would rest.’
When she and Reid were alone, she laid arms around him, cheek against his shoulder, and whispered forlornly, ‘What can we do?’
‘I don’t know,’ he replied into the sunny odor of her hair. ‘So far we’ve had scant choice, haven’t we? We may end our days here. As our friends said, there are worse fates.’
Her clasp tightened till the nails dug into his back. ‘You can’t mean that. These are the folk who burned – who will burn Knossos and end the peace of the Minos – so they can be free to go pirating!’
He didn’t answer directly, for he was thinking: That’s how she looks at it. Me, I don’t know. They’re rough, the Achaeans, but aren’t they open and upright in their fashion? And what about those human victims for the Minotaur?
Aloud he said. ‘Well, if nothing else, I can arrange your passage to Keftiu territory.’
‘Without you?’ She drew apart from him. Strangeness rose in her voice. Her look caught his and would not let go. ‘It will not be, Duncan. You will fare to Atlantis, and love me, and in Knossos you will beget our son. Afterward—’
‘Hush!’ Alarmed, he laid a hand across her mouth. Diores, at least, was probably quite capable of planting spies on the king’s mysterious visitors, the more so when one of them was a Cretan of rank. And the door drape wasn’t soundproof. Too late, Reid regretted not using the mentatór to give his party a language unknown here. Hunnish or Old Russian would have done quite well.
But in the desert they’d been too distracted to foresee a need; and maybe Diores would have forbidden magic on his ship; yes, doubtless he would have, if only to prevent those whom he was suspicious of from gaining that advantage.
‘These are, uh, matters too sacred to speak of here,’ Reid said. ‘Let’s seek a private place later.’
Erissa nodded. ‘Yes. I understand. Soon.’ Her lips writhed. She blinked hard. ‘Too soon. However long our fate will be in taking us, it will be too soon.’ Drawing him toward the bed: ‘You are not over-wearied, are you? This while that we have together?’
The slave who brought them breakfast in the morning, leftovers from last night’s roast ox, announced, ‘Prince Theseus asks the pleasure of my lord’s company. My lady is invited to spend the day with the queen and her girls.’ She had an accent; what homeland did she yearn for?
Erissa wrinkled her nose at Reid. She was in for a dull time, even if the girls were from noble families, learning housewifery as attendants on Aegeus’ consort. (She was his fourth in succession but would doubtless outlive him, he being too old to bring her to her grave of a dozen children beginning when she was fifteen.) Reid signed her to accept. Why give needless offense to touchy hosts?
The tunic, cloak, sandals, and Phrygian cap he donned were presents from Theseus’ wardrobe. Tall though the Achaeans were, few reached the six feet common in Reid’s well-nourished milieu. The prince actually topped the American by a couple of inches. The latter had been surprised at the degree of surprise this caused him, till he tracked down the reason: Mary Renault’s fine novels, which described Theseus as a short man. Well, she’d made – would make – a logical interpretation of the legend; but how much of the legend would reflect truth? For that matter, had this Aegeus and Theseus any identity with the father and son of the tradition?
They must, Reid thought hopelessly. Their names are associated with the fall of Knossos and the conquest of Crete. And Knossos will fall. Crete will be overrun, in our very near future, when Atlantis goes down.
The bronze sword he hung at his waist was from Aegeus, leaf-shaped, well-balanced, lovely and deadly. He could not fault the royal pair for stinginess.
He found Theseus waiting in the hall. Except for slaves tidying up, it felt cavernously empty and still after last evening’s carousal. (Torch-flare; fire roaring on a central hearthstone less loudly than the chants, footstampings, lyres and syrinxes and drums, shouts and brags that filled the smoky air; dogs snapping after bones flung them off trestle tables; servants scurrying to keep the winecups filled; and through it all, Theseus seated impassive, quietly questioning the strangers.) ‘Rejoice, my lord,’ Reid greeted.
‘Rejoice.’ The prince lifted a muscle-corded arm. ‘I thought you might like to be shown our countryside.’
‘You are most kind, my lord. Ah … my friends—?’
‘My captain Diores is taking the warriors Uldin and Oleg to his estate. He’s promised them horses, and they in turn have promised to show the use of that saddle with footrests which Uldin brought’
And he’ll pump them, Reid reflected, and he’ll try to split them off from Erissa and me…. Stirrups weren’t invented till millennia after this, were they? I read that somewhere. They were what made heavy cavalry possible. Suppose they catch on, here and now – what then?
Can time be changed? Does Erissa’s Thalassocracy have to die? Must I really leave her, in an eerie kind of incest, for her younger self?
If not … will the future grow into a different shape from what I knew? Will my Pamela ever be born? Will I?
He tried to summon his wife’s image and found that harder to do than it should have been, these few days after he was lost from her.
Theseus said, ‘Come,’ and led the way outside. He was broad in proportion to his height, but he walked lightly. Fair-skinned, tawny of hair and beard, his blunt-nosed, full-lipped features were handsome. The eyes were remarkable, set well apart and of an amber hue, leonine eyes. For the outing he had exchanged his gaudily embroidered festive garments for plain gray wool. He kept his golden headband, though, the golden brooch at his throat and bracelet on his thick wrist.
While the wind was brisk outdoors, it was not yet an autumn gale, and the clouds it sent scudding were white. Their shadows swept over a huge landscape, mountains to north and northwest, the Saronic Gulf to the south and west. Across those few miles, against blue-green whitecaps, Reid made out a cluster he could recognize as boathouses and beached ships at the Piraeus. A dirt road from there to here cut a brown streak through stubblefields and dusty-green olive orchards. The whole Attic plain was similarly dappled with agriculture. At a distance he noticed two large houses and their outbuildings that must belong to wealthy men, and numerous smallholder cottages. Groves of oak or poplar usually surrounded them. The mountains were densely forested. This was not his Greece.
He noticed how full of birds the sky was. Most he couldn’t name except in general terms, different kinds of thrush, dove,
duck, heron, hawk, swan, crow. Thus far men hadn’t ruined nature. Sparrows hopped among the courtyard cobblestones. Besides dogs, the animals were absent that would have wandered around a farm, swine, donkeys, sheep, goats, cows, chickens, geese. But workers bustled among the buildings which defined the enclosure. A household this big required plenty of labor, cleaning, cooking, milling, baking, brewing, spinning, weaving, endlessly. Most of the staff were women, and most had young children near their bare feet or clinging to their worn shifts: the next generation of slaves. However, several industries were carried on by men. Through open shed doors, Reid glimpsed in action a smithy, a ropewalk, a tannery, a potter’s wheel, a carpenter shop.
‘Are these all slaves, my lord?’ he asked.
‘Not all,’ Theseus said. ‘Particularly, it’s not wise to keep many unfree males about. We hire them, mostly Athenians, a few skilled foreigners.’ He grinned, his grin that never seemed to reach deeper than his teeth. ‘They’re encouraged to breed brats on our bondwomen. Thus everyone’s happy.’
Except maybe the bondwomen, Reid thought, the more so when their boys are sold away.
Theseus scowled. ‘We have to keep a Cretan clerk. No need; we’ve men who can write, aye, men whose forebears taught the Cretans to write! But the Minos requires it of us.’
To keep track of income and outgo, Reid deduced, partly for purposes of assessing tribute, partly for indications of what the Athenians may be up to. Say, what’s this about the Achaeans being literate before the Minoans were? That doesn’t make sense.
Theseus halted his complaint before he should grow indiscreet. ‘I thought we’d drive out to my own farmstead,’ he suggested. You can see a good bit on the way, and for myself I want to make sure the threshing and storing are well in hand.’
‘I’d enjoy that, my lord.’
The stable was the sole stone building, no doubt because horses were too valuable and loved to risk to fire. Not as big as their twentieth-century counterparts, they nevertheless were mettlesome animals which whickered softly and nuzzled Theseus’ palm when he stroked them. ‘Hitch Stamper and Long-tail to the everyday chariot,’ he ordered the head groom. ‘No, don’t summon a driver. I’ll take ’em.’
Two men could stand on the flat bed of the car, behind a bronze front and sides decorated with bas-reliefs. In war Theseus, armored, would have kept his place behind a near-naked youth who had the reins, himself wielding spear and sword against enemy infantry. Reid decided that was a skill which could only be acquired by training from babyhood. He had everything he could do just hanging on in the unsprung conveyance.
Theseus flicked whip over the horses and they clattered out. The twin wheels squeaked and rumbled. Even lacking ball bearings, it didn’t seem like much of a load for a pair of animals to draw. Then Reid noticed the choking chest-strap harness. What if Oleg made a horse collar?
Athens clustered nearly to the top of steep, rocky Acropolis Hill. It was a fair-sized city by present-day standards; Reid guessed at twenty or thirty thousand inhabitants, though a floating population from the hinterland and foreign parts might raise that figure. (He asked Theseus and got a quizzical stare. The Achaeans kept close track of many things, but counting people had not occurred to them.) Much of the settled area lay outside the defensive walls, indicating rapid growth. Buildings were adobe, flat-roofed, often three or four stories high, jammed along narrow, unpaved, crazily twisting streets. In those lanes Reid did see hogs, competing with mongrels, mice, roaches, and clouds of flies for the offal tossed from houses.
‘Make way!’ Theseus trumpeted. ‘Make way!’
They parted for him, the warriors, craftsmen, merchants, mariners, innkeepers, shopkeepers, scribes, laborers, prostitutes, housewives, children, hierophants, and Lord knew what whose movement and babble brought the city to life. Glimpses remained with Reid: A woman, one hand supporting a water jug on her head, one lifting her skirts above the muck. A gaunt donkey, overburdened with faggots, lashed forward by its countryman owner. A booth where a sandalmaker sat crying his wares. Another booth where a typically intricate bargain had just been struck, payment to be made partly in kind and partly in an agreed-on weight of metal. A coppersmith at work, shutting the whole world out of his head except for his hammer and the adze he was forging. An open winehouse door and a drunken sailor telling lengthy lies about the perils he had survived. Two little boys, naked, playing what looked remarkably like hopscotch. A portly burgher, apprentices around him to protect him from jostling. A squat, dark, bearded man in robe and high-crowned brimless hat who must be from Asia Minor … no, here they simply called it Asia….
The chariot rattled by that plateau, where several wooden temples stood, which would later be known as the Areopagus. It passed through a gateway in the city wall, whose roughly dressed stonework was inferior to the Mycenaen ruins Reid had once visited. (Now he wondered how long after Pamela’s day it would be before Seattle or Chicago lay tumbled, in silence broken only by crickets.) Beyond the ‘suburbs’ the horses came onto a rutted road and Theseus let them trot.
Reid dung to the rail. He hoped his knees wouldn’t be jolted backward or the teeth shaken out of his jaws.
Theseus noticed. He drew his beasts to a walk. They shimmied impatiently but obeyed. The prince looked around. ‘You’re not used to this, are you?’ he asked.
‘No, my lord. We … travel otherwise in my country.’
‘Riding?’
‘Well, yes. And, uh, in wagons that have springs to absorb the shock.’ Reid was faintly surprised to learn, out of his knowledge, that the Achaeans had a word for springs. Checking more closely, he found he had said ‘metal bowstaves.’
‘Hm,’ Theseus grunted. ‘Such must be costly. And don’t they soon wear out?’
‘We use iron, my lord. Iron’s both cheaper and stronger than bronze when you know how to obtain and work it. The ores are far more plentiful than those of copper or tin.’
‘Yes, so Oleg told me yesterday when I examined his gear. Do you know the secret?’
‘I fear not, my lord. It’s no secret in my country, but it doesn’t happen to be my work. I, well, plan buildings.’
‘Might your companions know?’
‘Perhaps.’ Reid thought that, given a chance to experiment, he could probably reconstruct the process himself. The basic idea was to apply a mechanical blast to your furnace, thus making the fire sufficiently hot to reduce the element, and afterward to alloy and temper the product until it became steel. Oleg might well have dropped in on such an operation in his era and observed equipment he could easily imitate.
They drove unspeaking for a while. At this pace it wasn’t hard to keep balanced, though impacts still ran up the shinbones. The clatter of wheels was nearly lost in the noise of the wind, where it soughed among poplars lining the road. It cuffed with chilly hands and sent cloaks flapping. A flight of crows beat against it. The sun made their blackness look polished, until a cloud swept past and for a moment brilliance went out of the landscape. Smoke streamed flat from the roof of a peasant’s clay house. Women stooped in his wheatfield, reaping it with sickles. The wind pressed their coarse brown gowns against their flanks. Two men followed them, shocking; as they moved along, they would pick up their spears and shift those too.
Theseus half turned, reins negligently in his right hand, so that his yellow eyes could rest on Reid. ‘Your tale is more eldritch than any I ever thought to hear,’ he said.
The American smiled wryly. ‘It is to me also.’
‘Borne on a whirlwind across the world, from lands so distant we’ve gotten no whisper about them, by the car of a magician – do you truly believe that was sheer happenstance? That there’s no destiny in you?’
‘I … don’t … think there is, my lord.’
‘Diores tells me you four spoke oddly about having come out of time as well as space.’ The deep voice was level but unrelenting; the free hand rested on a sword pommel. ‘What does that mean?’
Here it comes
, Reid told himself. Though his tongue was somewhat dry, he got his rehearsed answer out steadily enough. ‘We’re not sure either, my lord. Imagine how bewildered we were and are. And we’re confused as to reckoning. That’s natural, isn’t it? Our countries have no common reign or event to count from. I wondered if perhaps the wizard’s wagon had crossed both miles and years. It was only a wondering and I don’t really know.’
He dared not make an outright denial. Too many hints had been dropped or might be dropped. Theseus and Diores were no more ignorant of the nature of time than Reid; everywhere and everywhen, mystery has the same size. The concept of chronokinesis should not be unthinkable to them, who were used to oracles, prophets, and stories about predestined dooms.
Then why not tell them the whole truth? Because of Erissa.
Theseus’ tone roughened: ‘I’d be less worried if that Cretan didn’t share your bed.’
‘My lord,’ Reid protested, ‘she was swept along like the rest of us, by meaningless chance.’
‘Will you set her aside, then?’
‘No,’ Reid said, ‘I can’t,’ and wondered if that was not the bedrock fact. He added in haste, ‘Our sufferings have made a bond between us. Surely you, my lord, wouldn’t forsake a comrade. And aren’t you at peace with Crete?’
‘In a way,’ Theseus answered. ‘For a while.’
He stood motionless, drawn into himself, until suddenly:
The Dancer from Atlantis Page 8
