Free The Dancer from Atlantis by Poul Anderson

for Athens!
    Not the Athens he’d loved, he reminded himself. The temples on the Acropolis, the Tower of the Winds, the columns of Olympian
     Zeus – tiny friendly cafés, their
dolmades
and
tourko
and
ouzo,
smart shops, insane taxi drivers, old women in black, vendors of hard-roasted corn on the cob, cheerful men who all seem
     to have cousins in Brooklyn – forget them, because you dare not remember. Forget, too, Aristotle, Pericles, Aeschylus, the
     victory at Marathon, the siege of Troy, Homer himself. None of it exists, unless perhaps a few tribal chants have lines that
     will someday be preserved in an epic and thus endure after their makers are millennial dust. Everything else is a ghost, no,
     less than a ghost, a vision, a fading dream.
    You’re bound for the Athens of Prince Theseus.
    That much will last to your day. You’ll be thrilled in your boyhood to read how a hero named Theseus slew the gruesome Minotaur—
    A shadow fell across him.
    – the Minotaur which Erissa served.
    She joined him, ignoring the crewmen who, crowded back to leave them alone on this bench, kept looking and looking. A borrowed
     cloak was fastened, not over the shoulders of her tunic but about her waist to form a skirt.
    ‘Why?’ Reid asked, pointing at the garment.
    She shrugged. ‘Best I muffle myself like an Achaean woman.’ The Keftiu words fell flatly out of her mouth. She stared at the
     horizon.
    ‘Isn’t this wonderful?’ he said, trying clumsily to hearten her. ‘I can understand why Aphrodite was born from the sea foam.’
    ‘What?’ Her eyes, turned the hue of dull jade, swung to him. ‘What do you speak of?’
    ‘Why, why, don’t the Achaeans,’ he stammered, ‘don’t they believe the goddess of … love … rose from the sea off Cyprus?’
    She sneered. ‘Aphrodite, cow-teated, barrel-buttocked, the bitch forever in heat?’
    Reid cast an alarmed glance past her. Probably quite a few of those men had a working knowledge of Cretan. Nobody seemed to
     have heard, though, through the singing air.
    ‘The Goddess, yes, in Her form of Britomartis the Maiden, She arose thus,’ Erissa said.
    He thought: I suppose the Achaeans kept – will keep – the beautiful myth, giving it to what’s now a primitive fertilityfigure… after Crete has been overthrown.
    Erissa’s fist smote the rail. ‘The sea is Hers – and ours!’ she cried. ‘What spell made you forget, Duncan?’
    ‘I tell you, I’m a mortal man, more lost than you are,’ he said desperately. ‘I’m trying to find out what’s happened to us.
     You’ve gone backward in time yourself, and—
    ‘Hush.’ Self-controlled again she laid a hand on his arm and whispered: ‘Not here. Later, as soon as may be, but not here.
     That Diores isn’t the yokel he pretends. He watches, listens, probes. And he is the enemy.’
    Traffic was thinning out as stormy autumn approached, but they spoke two other ships on their first afternoon. One, rowing
     into the wind, was a Kefriu-owned freighter, though its crew seemed to be drawn from the whole eastern Mediterranean, bound
     from Pylos with hides which ought to fetch a goodly amount of timber in Lebanon. The skipper expected to take the wood on
     to Egypt and swap it for glassware before returning to his home port on Naxos for a season’s ease. Diores explained that such
     runs had become profitable again since Pharaoh Amenhotep pacified his Syrian province. The other and larger vessel boomed
     straight toward Avaris, carrying British tin. Its men were still more mixed, including some who, glimpsed across unrestful
     scores of yards, appeared to be North European recruits. The world today was astonishingly more cosmopolitan than it would
     be later on in history.
    And once, miles off, Reid glimpsed the reason for that. A lean galley quartered the horizon. Several of Diores’ people drew
     knives at it or made obscene gestures. ‘What’s yonder craft?’ Oleg inquired.
    ‘A Cretan warship,’ Diores