Erissa knelt, said a prayer, divided a loaf of bread and laid a portion on the boulder for the nymph to give her birds. Rising, she said, “We are welcome. Bring our food and wine from the wagon. And Peneleos, won’t you remove that helmet and breastplate? We can see anybody coming miles away; and it’s not meet to carry weapons before a female deity”
“I beg her forgiveness,” the guardsmen said. He was less chagrined than he was glad to take off his burden and relax. They enjoyed a frugal, friendly lunch.
“Well, we were going to talk over our plans,” Uldin said afterward.
“Not yet,” Erissa answered. “I’ve had a better idea. The nymph is well disposed toward us. If we lie down and sleep awhile, she may send us a dream for guidance.”
Peneleos shifted about where he sat. “I’m not sleepy,” he said. “Besides, my duty—”
“Of course. Yet you also have a duty to learn for your king what you can of these strange matters. True?”
“M-m-m yes.”
“It may be that she will favor you above us, this being your country and not ours. Surely she’ll be pleased if you show her the respect of inviting her counsel. Come:’ Erissa took his hand. He rose to her gentle tugging. “Over here. On the sunlit side of the rock. Sit down, lean back, feel her warmth. And now—” She drew from her bosom a small bronze mirror. “Now look into this token of the Goddess, Who is the Mother of nymphs."
She knelt before him. He stared bemusedly at her and the shining disk and back. “No,” she murmured. “The mirror only, Peneleos, wherein you will see that which She wills.” She turned it slowly.
Good Lord! thought Reid. He drew Oleg and Uldin away, behind the big stone.
“What’s she doing?” the Russian inquired uneasily. “Hsh: Reid whispered. “Sit. Be quiet. This is a holy thing.”
“A heathen thing, I fear.” Oleg crossed himself. But he and the Hun obeyed.
Sunlight poured through murmurous leaves. The sweet smell of dried grass lifted like smoke to meet it. Bees hummed among briar roses. Erissa crooned.
When she came around the boulder, none of her morning’s cheerfulness was left. She had laid that aside. Her look was at once grave and exalted. The white streak in her hair stood forth against its darkness like a crown.
Reid got to his feet. “You’ve done it?” he asked.
She nodded. “He will not awaken before I command. Afterward he will think he drowsed off with the rest of us and had whatever dream I will have related to him.” She gave the American a close regard. “I did not know you knew of the Sleep.”
“What witchcraft is this?” Oleg rasped.
Hypnotism, Reid named it to himself. Except that she has more skill in it than any therapist I ever heard of in my own era. Well, I suppose that’s a matter of personality.
“It is the Sleep,” Erissa said, “that I lay on the sick when it can ease their pain and on the haunted to drive their nightmares out of them. It does not always come when I wish. But Peneleos is a simple fellow and I spent the trip here putting him at ease.”
Uldin nodded. “I’ve watched shamans do what you did,” he remarked. “Have no fears, Oleg. Though I never awaited meeting a she-shaman.”
“Now let us speak,” Erissa said.
Her sternness brought home to Reid like a sword thrust that she was not really the frightened castaway, yearning exile, ardent and wistful mistress he had imagined he knew. Those were waves on a deep sea. She had indeed become a stranger to the girl who remembered him—a slave who won free, a wanderer who stayed alive among savages, a queen in the strong household she herself had brought to being, a healer, witch, priestess and prophetess.
Suddenly he had an awesome feeling that her triune Goddess had in all truth entered this place and possessed her.
“What is the doom of Atlantis?” she went on.
Reid stooped and poured himself a cup of wine to help him swallow his dread. “You don’t recall?” he mumbled.
“Not the end. The months before, yours and mine, on the holy island and in Knossos, those are unforgotten. But I will not speak of what I now know will be for you even as it was for me. That is too sacred.
“I will say this: I have questioned out what year this is, and put together such numbers as the years since the present Minos ascended his throne or since the war between Crete and Athens. From these I have reckoned that we are four-and-twenty years from that day when I am borne out of Rhodes to Egypt. You will soon depart hence, Duncan.”
Oleg’s ruddiness had paled. Uldin had retreated into stolidity.
Reid gulped the sharp red wine. He didn’t look at Erissa; his gaze took refuge on Mount Hymettus above the treetops. “What is the last you clearly remember?” he asked.
“We went to Knossos in spring, we sisters of the rite. I danced with the bulls.” Her measured, impersonal tone softened. “Afterward you came, and we—But Theseus was already there, and others I cannot remember well. Maybe I was too happy to care. Our happiness does live on within me.” Quieter yet: “It will live as long as I do, and I will take it home with me to the Goddess.”
Again she was the wise-woman in counciclass="underline" “We need a clearer foreknowledge than my clouded recollections of the end, or the tales about it that I gathered later, can give us. What have you to. tell?”
Reid gripped the cup till his fingers hurt. “Your Atlantis,” he said, “is that not a volcanic island about sixty miles north of Crete?”
“Yes. I believe the smoke rising from the mountain, as it often does, brought about the name ‘Land of the Pillar.’ Atlantis is the seat of the Ariadne, who reigns over rites and votaries throughout the realm even as the Minos reigns over worldly affairs.”
Ariadne? Not a name, as myth was to make it, but a title: “Most Sacred One.”
“I know Atlantis will sink in fire, ash, storm, and destruction,” Erissa said.
“Then you know everything I do, or nearly,” Reid answered in wretchedness. “My age had nothing but shards. It happened too long ago.”
He had read a few popular accounts of the theorizing and excavating that had begun in earnest in his own day. A cluster of islands, Thera and its still tinier companions, the Santorini group, had looked insignificant except for being remnants left by an eruption that once dwarfed Krakatoa. But lately several scientists—yes, Anghelos Galanopoulos in the lead—had started wondering. If you reconstructed the single original island, you got “a picture oddly suggestive of the capital of Atlantis as described by Plato; and ancient walls were known to be buried under the lava and cinders. That settlement might be better preserved than Pompeii, what parts had not vanished in the catastrophe.
To be sure, Plato could simply have been embellishing his discourses in the Timaios and the Kritias with a fiction. He had put his lost continent in midocean, impossibly big and impossibly far back if it was to have fought Athens. Yet there was some reason to believe he drew on a tradition, that half: memory of the Minoan empire which flickered through classical legend.
Assume his figures were in error. He claimed to derive the story from Solon, who had it from an Egyptian priest, who said he drew on records in another, older language. Translating from Egyptian to Greek numerals, you could easily get numbers above one hundred wrong by a factor of ten; and a timespan counted in months could be garbled into the same amount of years.
Plato was logically forced to move his Atlantis beyond the Pillars of Hercules. The Mediterranean didn’t have room for it. But take away the obviously invented hinterland. Shrink the city plan by one order of magnitude. The outline became not too different from that of Santorini. Change years to months. The date of Atlantis’ death shifted to between 1500 and 1300 B.C.