The Dancer from Atlantis

by Poul Anderson

  ‘I—’ The older man shook his head, stunned. ‘I know not what to believe.’

  ‘Nor did I, until this final sign came to me,’ Reid replied.

  He had fabled and talked mechanically, his consciousness wandering; for he knew he woud reach Knossos where the girl awaited him. Now his mind came back. The man and boy, aroused wife and children and servants who stood fearfully in the door, became real; they could love and mourn and die. He said to Dagonas, ‘Crete will suffer wide destruction too. Won’t you help me rescue Erissa?’

  ‘Oh, yes, oh, yes.’ The boy started off at a trot which quickened toward a run.

  His father’s voice stopped him: ‘Wait! Let me think—’

  ‘I cannot linger,’ Dagonas answered. He did briefly, though, gazing at Erissa. ‘You look like her,’ he said.

  ‘We are kin.’ Her tone was faint. ‘Go.’

  The ship could not start before there was adequate light to steer by. But it took that long to gather crew and supplies anyway. The food came from their homes, water from the public cisterns, by Reid’s command; he didn’t dare try dealing with officialdom. As it was, he sweated while his boys hastened down the streets – torch in one hand, since the moon had descended behind the western hills, streaming like a red comet’s tail; bucket or bundle in the other, or tucked beneath the arm or slung across the shoulder – and thudded up the gangplank. Their families began to appear on the docks, an eddying of bodies in the gloom, an uneasy rustle of voices which rose and rose as questions received a grisly answer. This brought other, nearby householders forth. But most doors stayed shut. Folk slept well between their days of revelry.

  Some decided to evacuate immediately. No few boats left, even before the galley did. Dagonas’ parents were not included. They meant to carry the news from home to home till the corrida started and later ask that a public announcement be made. The assault on Velas, when news of that got about, wouldn’t help; nor would offended lords spiritual and temporal who had not been consulted. But maybe the example of the hundred or so persons who were already afloat would inspire – maybe, maybe—

  We’ve done what we can here, Reid thought. We’ll keep trying elsewhere. Sixty miles or thereabouts to cross, and we average three or four knots. The boat from Athens that we’re towing for insurance cuts that down a bit, but no matter, because we’ll arrive by night in any case and have to lie out till dawn.

  The east was paling. The ship’s crew cast off and stood to their posts. The sight of Dagonas’ father and mother, holding hands and waving, stayed with Reid until the thought came: In twenty-four hours, I’ll see Erissa.

  She did not seek him until well after sunrise. He stood in the bows of the upper deck. The morning lay around them, infinitely blue: cloudless overhead, surging beneath in fluid sapphires, cobalts, amethysts, turquoises and in snowy lacework. A favoring wind heeled the ship over a little; the planks moved like the back of a galloping animal. Bow waves hissed, rigging creaked and whistled. The sun was shaded off by the bellying genoa, but elsewhere made sparks and shimmers and called forth the first pungency of tar. A pair of dolphins played tag with the hull. Their torpedo bodies would rush in until it seemed a collision was certain, then veer off, graceful as a bull-dancer. Gulls mewed above the masts.

  Forward, a barely visible haziness betokened Crete. Aft, the cone of Pillar Mountain was a black blot on the horizon, the last glimpse of Atlantis.

  ‘Duncan.’

  He turned. Like him, she had resumed Cretan garb. Her hair rippled in the breeze that felt cool on his own bare breast. Suddenly the crew, taking their ease on the thwarts below, and the helmsman and the two lookouts above, were far away.

  ‘May I be here with you?’ she asked.

  ‘O gods, Erissa.’ He pulled her close. They didn’t kiss, but she laid her cheek against his.

  ‘I’ve wanted you so,’ she whispered. He had no answer.

  She released him. They stood side by side at the rail. ‘Eldritch to ride again on this ship,’ she said. ‘After all the years. I do not know if it is the ghost or I am.’

  ‘Reaching Knossos will be hard for you,’ he said, looking out to sea.

  ‘Yes. My parents, their household … we had a pet monkey I called Mischief Well, it must be. And I will have been given to meet my dead once more. A-a-am I not favored?’ She rubbed her eyes.

  ‘Yourself,’ he said.

  ‘That!’ She caught his arm in both hands and leaned close to him. ‘Duncan, do you believe … can you imagine I’m jealous? I feared what you would think of me, old me. But to lie awake in my father’s house, knowing that then, then I am having the dearest hours of my life—’

  The mountain sundered.

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  Reid’s first warning was a yell from a lookout. He snapped his head around. The cone no longer thrust out of the sea. In its place, monstrously swelling, was a wall of night.

  An instant later the first shock wave struck. A fist hit Reid’s whole body and smashed him down on the deck. The ship staggered, bow shoved into the water, which cataracted aboard. The roaring was so huge that it ceased to be sound, it became the universe, and the universe was a hammer.

  The galley righted itself but reeled. Still the blackness grew. It filled half the circle of the world. It spread swiftly across the sky; for a while the sun shone ember-red, then went out. Through and through the murk flared lightning, immense jags and sheets of it, hellish blue-white. Their thunders rolled amidst the steady bone-rattling bellow from Atlantis.

  Reid glimpsed a stone, larger than the ship, glow as it fell from heaven. Blindly, he clutched the rail with one hand, Erissa with the other. The boulder struck half a mile off. Water reached for the zenith. White across black, lightning-lit, it did not splash under that impact, it shattered. A rising wind rived glasslike shards off it. It tumbled, and the sea was aboil. Reid saw the front wave rush upon them. Higher than the mastheads, fanged with spume, it made a noise of its own, a freight train rumble. He shouted, ‘Head ’er into that! Bow on or we’re done!’

  The roaring, booming, whining, skirling gulped his voice and spat it back. For an idiotic instant he knew that he had cried in English.

  But the quartermaster understood. He put the helm down and the galley, rocking, sluggish from bilges full, came around in time. Barely in time. Water torrented. Blind, beaten, Reid clung while the billow went over him. He had a moment to think: If we’re not swept away, we’ll drown here. I’m out of air, my ribs are being crushed— The galley wallowed. A mast lay in wreckage. The next wave took the next mast.

  Lesser blocks were striking everywhere around. They made the sea explode in gouts of steam. One smote the deck and went bouncing down the length of the hull, leaving char marks where it touched. The boy at the helm screamed – he could not be heard, but lightning brought him out of the night, mouth open, eyelids stretched, free hand lifted in defense or appeal – until it reached him. He exploded too. Another wave washed the place clean where he had been.

  The lookouts were likewise gone. Reid let go his hold and crawled aft. Somebody had to take the rudder. Erissa vaulted to the rowers’ level, where they hung on and wailed. He glimpsed her, waist deep, slapping, scratching, forcing them to take oars and bailing buckets. But he didn’t see much more; the tiller fought so crazily.

  A second volcanic burst smote the air. A third. He was too stunned to count them, to know anything except that he must keep the prow into the waves. A couple of crewmen reached the deck, bearing axes. They cleared the broken masts away. Oars out, the galley had some power now to save itself; and the heaviness departed as the hull was emptied.

  The seas ran back under the black sky, save when lightning turned them into brass. Then each drop flung off their crests stood livid, as if frozen in flight. Thunder banged through the ongoing growl and rush and shriek, and blindness clapped back down again. The air reeked of brimstone and poison.

  Ash began to fall. Rain followed, driven by the wind till it h
it like spears; but it was not clean water, it was gritty, lacerating mud. A new bang and drumfire betokened a new eruption. They were fainter this time than the storm noises.

  Erissa returned, chinning herself to the upper deck since the ladders were smashed. Reid couldn’t see her till she was close; he could see almost nothing through the ashen acid rain; the bows were invisible, he steered by feel and by the occasional glimpse when some fulguration was fierce enough to penetrate the darkness and flog his eardrums with its thunder. She had lost her skirt, shed her sandals, was nude except for the hair and dust plastered to her skin. She laid her hand over his on the tiller, her lips to his ear. He could barely hear her: ‘Let me help you.’

  ‘Thanks.’ He didn’t need it physically. The ship was under control and the weather couldn’t get worse than a hurricane. But it was good to have her beside him on this deck that lurched through ruin.

  Crack! flared a lightning bolt. He glimpsed her profile, etched white athwart the horrible sky. She looked at him, and bow-ward again, showing no more than the will to stay afloat. Darkness fell anew, and wind-yell and wave-rush; thunder rolled like the wheels of an Achaean war chariot.

  The hours passed.

  When Crete hove in view, it was sudden. There the cliffs were, stark above a rage of surf. Reid slammed the helm over. Erissa, leaning beside him – for once more the rudder sought to wrench free and thresh among murderous currents – exclaimed, ‘It can’t be this soon! ’ Her voice was blown thin and tattered through the clamor, the boom, the hiss of black rain.

  ‘We were carried on a tsunami,’ he called in reply, but doubted if she heard. Never mind. The need was to claw off that shore. The torrents which had already scarred the heights and borne away who knew how many homes and dwellers, were trying to fling this vessel on the rocks. By another flash, Reid saw the wreck of another galley, high up on ground stripped bare.

  Atlantis had sunk. He hoped fleetingly that Velas’ little girl had been killed at once, by the initial blast, before she had time to cry for her daddy. The sea power of the Minos was shattered. Theseus and his merry men were overrunning what remained of quake-tumbled Knossos. Reid wondered dimly, through aches and exhaustion, what reason was left to strive.

  Well, whatever Erissa, who had now twice in her life lost the life of her people, waged war for. Maybe just pride, he thought in his battered head: to scorn death’s warm temptation, to fight on after Ragnarok.

  They seemed to have won clear. He left her at the tiller and went below to check on his crew. Eight had been lost overboard, besides the boy who saw a red-hot stone coming for him. Several more had collapsed, lay rolling between the benches. The rest rowed or bailed, automatons, emptiness behind their eyes. Uldin huddled in the bilge, face covered by arms against the lightning that streaked over him. When Reid shook the Hun, he retched.

  Well, Reid thought dully, we’ll get a safe distance out, make a sea anchor from a sail and spar if the towed boat doesn’t suffice, and rest. To sleep, perchance to dream – what dreams may come?

  Smoke still sooted heaven, but the sun’s ball, the color of half-clotted blood, rolled westward in it. Crete could be seen as a blurry mass at the gray-brown edge of vision. The wind had dropped for a while, the rain had ceased, the air lay thick and stinking. Waves chopped the galley in a whoosh and squelp, left it to rock and swing while they trundled onward. The waters were dark, sludgy, corrupted with cinders.

  Northward, where Atlantis had been, total blackness reared nightmare huge. Lightning scribbled swift symbols across it, but at this distance the thunders came only as a continued muttering.

  They sat gathered on the top deck: forty-one young Minoans, naked or nearly so, slumped over their knees, grimed, bleeding from gale-blown grit, hollowed out less by fatigue – a few hours’ ease restored those bodies to tautness – than by that which had slain their Atlantis. Uldin squatted among them, flinching at each far-off blink and bang but his scarred features truculently set. Erect to confront them, dressed in sodden Achaean tunics, were Reid and Erissa.

  The American dragged the words out of himself: ‘We had a forevision of the destruction of your homeland and Keft’s conquest by barbarians. We tried to give warning to your folk and to the Minos. But unless those boats which left when we did weathered the storm, we failed altogether. Now what should we do?’

  ‘What’s left?’ a boy asked through tears.

  ‘Life,’ Erissa told him.

  ‘We … could seek Athens,’ Uldin said. ‘In spite of everything—’

  Dagonas sprang up and struck him across the mouth. He rose too, cursing, and drew his saber. Knives flew free of sailors’ belts. Erissa leaped. She caught Uldin’s sword arm and clung. ‘Stop!’ she shouted. ‘Blood brotherhood!’

  ‘Not with him,’ the Hun grated. Dagonas poised, knife in fist.

  Erissa sneered. ‘Especially with him, who manned an oar while you cowered and yammered like a eunuch.’

  She released him. Uldin appeared to shrink into himself. He crept aside, hunkered down, and spoke no more.

  Erissa returned to Reid. In the dull red-gray light, he saw that her nostrils flared and her head was carried high. ‘You shouldn’t have,’ he stammered. ‘I – I was too slow, as always.’

  She swung upon the crew. ‘Never give in,’ she said. ‘Our colonies remain, on islands throughout these waters. They’re shaken, but most of them will abide. If we no longer rule the whole sea, we can rule our own lives while they last. We’ll seek a place – Rhodes would be best, I think – where we can start afresh. In the name of the Goddess!’

  ‘That bitch who betrayed us?’ answered the weeping boy.

  Dagonas signed himself and gasped, ‘Be quiet! Do you want to bring down more wrath?’

  ‘What worse can She do?’ the boy said.

  Erissa told them: ‘The law is that men must render account to the gods, but not the gods to men. I am not sure this is right. But it makes no difference. The Labyrinth has fallen. I will not forsake the Goddess in Her need.’

  Dagonas, who had remained standing, went to the rail and peered through the gloom toward Crete. ‘Then let’s seek Rhodes,’ he said. ‘But first – you have a namesake yonder, Erissa.’

  She nodded. ‘We have many dear ones there, and room and provisions. Do you think we might try to rescue some?’

  ‘As many as may be,’ the young man said; and even in this sullen illumination, Reid saw how he flushed, ‘but before all, the girl Erissa.’

  The woman laid a hand on his shoulder and looked long into his face. ‘That’s Dagonas who speaks,’ she said wonderingly.

  Reid stirred. ‘You, uh y-y-you think we can send a party ashore?’ he stuttered.

  ‘Yes,’ she answered with the calm that had been hers for most of these hours. ‘I know that headland, therefore I know we can reach Knossos harbor before nightfall. Whatever Theseus is doing, has done, most of the city must yet be in chaos. A band of men, armed and determined, should be able to make their way.’ The big eyes resting on him were the same clear green as would shine across this sea once more, come winter. ‘They will, you know.’

  He nodded. I can’t lose, he thought, until after I have the girl back whose image dances among those funeral clouds. Later – well, later we’ll be free of foreknowledge.

  He did draw old Erissa aside and murmur to her, ‘You haven’t any recollection, have you, of anyone on Rhodes this year who might have been yourself?’

  ‘No,’ she said.

  ‘But then—’

  ‘Then I will most likely never come there alive,’ she said quietly. ‘Or something else may happen. Something else has in truth already happened, since the Knossos where I remember we had each other is no longer waiting for us. No matter now. Let’s do what we can, first for that girl—’ She paused. ‘Strange,’ she said, ‘to think of myself as a being in pain and need of help.’ Drawing breath: ‘First we do what we can for her and whoever else we can reach. Afterward we – you and I – maybe w
e can be happy, or maybe we can endure.’

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  Little remained in the harbor: snags of buildings, fragments of ships, broken corpses, strewn goods, mud-filled streets. Downward-sifting dust had covered all bright walls with grayness. The sun smoldered barely above those heights where Knossos lay. There stood pillars of smoke. The city was burning.

  Reid and Erissa took no more than half a dozen along in the boat. The dismasted galley needed oarsmen; why risk them ashore? A large party would draw attention, without being large enough to deal with the consequences. Besides Dagonas and Uldin, they had Ashkel, Tylisson, Haras, and Rhizon. There had been no chance to stow armor except for bucklers. Weapons were swords, knives, a couple of pikes. Reid gripped his spear convulsively. It was the sole instrument with which he might hope to do anything useful.

  They moored at the stump of a pier and climbed over the wreckage. Tidal waves had left the ground soaked; muck lay ankle-deep on the lower levels, chilly, plopping and sucking around sandals. Dust filled the air, the nose, the mouth. Sweat, running down skin in the unnatural heat, made channels through that grime.

  None greeted the landing. Doubtless Theseus would have the area occupied next morning in anticipation of his ships. At the moment, though, he must have everything he could do, bringing Knossos somewhat under control.

  ‘He established himself – he will take what parts of the Labyrinth the quakes left standing.’ Erissa said, ‘The Minos he slew with his own hand, our gentle old Minos. His patrols ranged about through the night, disarming citizens, herding many together for slavery. Tomorrow he summoned his supporters among the folk. He made the bull sacrifice in token that now he was king. The Ariadne stood beside him. Thus I was told, years afterward, by people who were there. The knowledge may help us now.’

  ‘It makes no difference,’ Uldin grunted. ‘What else would you expect? We’ll be avoiding patrols in any case.’