Read Online The Dancer from Atlantis by Poul Anderson - Free Book Online

gave them a freezing glare. They stood firm beneath his saddle. ‘You leave me no choice,’ he snapped. ‘What’s your plan?’
    Put up or shut up, Reid thought, and he wondered if this was how leaders were made. ‘I’ll work on a show that may impress
     them,’ he said. ‘We have the vehicle itself – and, for instance—’ He demonstrated his pipe lighter. The spurt of flame drew
     exclamations. ‘We’ll want defenses, of course, in case we do have to fight. You, Uldin, Oleg, take charge of that. I should
     imagine that between you – a mounted bowman, an ironclad warrior – you’ll make a pack of starvelings wary aboutattacking. Erissa, you and I will gather sticks for a signal fire, in case a ship comes by.’
    – She said to him when they were working alone: ‘I wonder more and more if this is wise. Duncan. A captain might not dare stand
     in. He might take our beacon for a lure. Or if he does land, he might well see us as prey, to be robbed and enslaved. Maybe
     we should trust in the Goddess and our ability to make the desert folk guide us to Egypt. The sea lanes grow ever more perilous
     and cruel, when the strong hand of the Minos is no longer lifted against piracy.’
    ‘Minos!’ he cried, jarred; and the knowledge of where and when he was stood blindingly before him.
    He started to ask her out – the Keftiu, yes, the people of Keft, a large island in the Midworld Sea between Egypt and those
     lands the Achaeans had overrun – Crete! – yes, the second language she knew was Achaean, everybody with foreign connections
     must master it, now that those barbarians were swarming into the Aegean Sea and too arrogant to learn the speech once spoken
     in stately Knossos and on lost Atlantis—
    Achaean
ran through Reid. He had no more Greek than the average educated twentieth-century American, but that was enough to open for
     him the identity of the tongue he had learned. He saw past the patterns of an alphabet which hadn’t evolved yet, to the language
     itself, and knew that Achaean was an ancestor of Hellenic.
    And that was where the name ‘Atlantis’ came from. ‘Land of the Pillar’ translated into
Gaia Atlantis.
    ‘Sail ho!’ Oleg bellowed.
    The ship was large for its milieu, a ninety-footer. When there was no fair wind, it put out fifty oars. The hull, black with
     pitch, was wide amidships (Erissa said this was a merchantman, not a slender warcraft), rounded in the stern, rising sheer
     from a cutwater in the bows. Stem and stern alike were decked over, protected by wicker bulwarks and ornamented with carved
     and colored posts in the forms of a horsehead and a fishtail. Two huge painted eyes stared forward. Under the rowing benches
     that stretched between the sides, planks were laid so that men need not clamber across the cargo stowed in the bottom. At
     present the mast was down; it, the yard, and the sail were lashed in the crotches of two Y-shaped racks fore and aft. Keel
     barely aground in the shallows, the vessel waited.
    Most of its crew stayed aboard, alert. Sun glared off bronze spearheads. Otherwise metal was scarce. The squarish shields
     had only rivets securing several plies of boiled cowhide to wooden frames. The common sailor made do with body protection
     of leather over a tunic like Erissa’s, or with none.
    Diores, the captain, and the seven young men who accompanied him ashore were a gorgeous exception. They could afford the best;
     shortage of copper and tin was the economic foundation of the military aristocracy which ruled most of the Bronze Age world.
     In high-plumed helmets, ornate breastplates, brass facings on shields and on the leather strips that dangled past their kilts,
     greaves on shins, leaf-shaped swords in gold-ornamented scabbards, cloaks dyed in reds and blues and saffrons, they might
     have walked straight out of the
Iliad.
    They’ll walk straight into it, Reid thought eerily. Asking, he had learned Troy was a strong and prosperous city-state;