Atlantis and Other Places

by Harry Turtledove

  “Neither will I, then,” Oreus promised. But he did not promise to forget. I wish I could have forced such a vow from him, but the only thing worse than a promise broken is a promise made or forced that is certain to be broken.

  We set out on a fine spring day, the sun shining down brightly from the sky. A wind off the hills filled my nostrils with the spicy fragrance of pines. It also filled the saffron sail, which pulled the Horse of Bronze across the wine-dark sea (an omen I should have taken, but I did not, I did not) fast enough to cut a creamy wake in the water.

  The Inner Sea was calm. In spring and summer, the Inner Sea usually is. The Chalcippus’ motion was as smooth and gentle as an easy trot across a meadow. This notwithstanding, several strong hes leaned over the rail and puked up their guts all the way to the horse in them. Some simply cannot take the sea, do what they will.

  I am not one who suffers so. I stood at the stern, one hand on each steering oar. Another he called the stroke. He set the speed at my direction, but I did not have to do it myself. I was captain aboard the Chalcippus, yes, but among us he who leads must have a light hand, or those he presumes to lead will follow no more. Not all hes see this clearly, which is one reason we have been known—oh, yes, we have been known—to fight among ourselves.

  But all was well when we first set out. The wind blew strongly, and from a favorable direction. We did not have to row long or row hard. But I wanted the hes to get some notion of what they would need to do later, if the wind faltered or if we fell in with enemies. They still reckoned rowing a sport and not a drudgery, and so they worked with a will. I knew that was liable to change as readily as the wind, but I made the most of it while it lasted.

  Some of the hes muttered when we passed out of sight of land. “Are you foals again?” I called to them. “Do you think you will fall off the edge of the earth here in the middle of the Inner Sea? Wait till we are come to Ocean the Great. Then you will find something worth worrying about.”

  They went on muttering, but now they muttered at me. That I did not mind. I feared no mutiny, not yet. When I set my will against theirs in any serious way, then I would see. A captain who does not know when to let the crew grumble deserves all the trouble he finds, and he will find plenty.

  Oreus came up to me when new land heaved itself up over the western horizon. “Is it true what they say about the folk of these foreign parts?” he asked. He was young, as I have said; the failed attack against the sphinxes had been his first time away from the homeland.

  “They say all manner of things about the folk of foreign parts,” I answered. “Some of them are true, some nothing but lies. The same happens when other folk speak of us.”

  He gestured impatiently. “You know what I mean. Is it true the folk hereabouts”—he pointed to the land ahead—“are cripples? Missing half their hindquarters?”

  “The fauns? Cripples?” I laughed. “By the gods who made them, no! They are as they are supposed to be, and they’ll run the legs off you if you give them half a chance. They’re made like satyrs. They’re half brute, even more so than satyrs, but that’s how they work: torso and thinking head above, horse below.”

  “But only the back part of a horse?” he persisted. When I nodded, he gave back a shudder. “That’s disgusting. I can stand it on goaty satyrs, because they’re sort of like us only not really. But these faun things—it’s like whoever made them couldn’t wait to finish the job properly.”

  “Fauns are not mockeries of us. They are themselves. If you expect them to behave the way we do, you’ll get a nasty surprise. If you expect them to act the way they really do, everything will be fine—as long as you keep an eye on them.”

  He did not like that. I had not expected that he would. But then, after what passed for reflection with him, he brightened. “If they give me a hard time, I’ll bash them.”

  “Good,” I said. It might not be good at all—it probably would not be good at all, but telling Oreus not to hit something was like telling the sun not to cross the sky. You could do it, but would he heed you?

  I did not want to come ashore among the fauns at all. But rowing is thirsty work, and our water jars were low. And so, warily, with archers and spearers posted at the bow, I brought the Chalcippus toward the mouth of a little stream that ran down into the sea.

  As I say, fauns are brutes. They scarcely know how to grow crops or work copper, let alone bronze. But a stone arrowhead will let the life out of a he as well as any other. If they gave us trouble, I wanted to be ready to fight or to trade or to run, whichever seemed the best idea at the time.

  It turned out to be trade. Half a dozen fauns came upon us as we were filling the water jars—and, being hes on a lark, splashing one another in the stream like a herd of foals. The natives carried spears and arrows, which, sure enough, were tipped with chipped stone. Two of them also carried, on poles slung over their shoulders, the gutted carcass of a boar.

  “Bread?” I called to them, and their faces brightened. They are so miserable and poor, they sometimes grind a mess of acorns up into flour. Real wheaten bread is something they seldom see. For less than it was worth, I soon got that lovely carcass aboard the Horse of Bronze. My crew would eat well tonight. Before we sailed, before the fauns slipped back into the woods, I found another question to ask them: “Are the sirens any worse than usual?”

  They could understand my language, it being not too far removed from their own barbarous jargon. Their chief—I think that is what he was, at any rate; he was certainly the biggest and strongest of them—shook his head. “No worser,” he said. “No better, neither. Sirens is sirens.”

  “True,” I said, and wished it were a lie.

  An island lies west of the land west of ours. Monsters haunt the strait between mainland and island: one that grabs with tentacles for ships sailing past, another that sucks in water and spits it out to make whirlpools that can pull you down to the bottom of the sea.

  We slipped past them and down the east coast of the island. The gods’ forge smoked, somewhere deep below the crust of the world. What a slag heap they have built up over the eons, too, so tall that snow still clings to it despite the smoke issuing from the vent.

  The weather turned warm, and then warmer, and then hot. We stopped for water every day or two, and to hunt every now and again. There are fauns also on the island, which I had not known and would not have if we had not rushed by them while coursing after deer. Next to them, the fauns of the mainland are paragons of sophistication. I see no way to embarrass them more than to say that, yet they would not be embarrassed if they knew I said it. They would only take its truth for granted. They have not even the sophistication to regret that which is.

  Maybe they were as they were because they knew no better. And maybe they were as they were because the sirens hunt them as we hunted that stag through the woods. We would not be as we are, either, not with sirens for near neighbors.

  I wish we would have had nothing to do with them. What a he wishes and what the gods give him are all too often two different things. What the gods gave us was trouble. Hylaeus, Nessus, and I had just killed a deer and were butchering it when a siren came out of the woods and into the clearing where we worked. She stood there, watching us.

  I have never seen a siren who was not a she. I have never heard of a siren who was a he. How there come to be more sirens is a mystery of the gods. The one we saw was quite enough.

  In their features, sirens might be beautiful shes. Past that, though, there is nothing to them that would tempt the eye of even the most desperately urgent he. They are, not to put too fine a point on it, all over feathers, with arms that are half wings and with tail feathers in place of a proper horse’s plume. Their legs are the scaly, skinny legs of a bird, with the grasping claws of a bird of prey.

  But the eye is not the only gateway to the senses. The siren asked, “What are you doing here?” A simple question, and I had all I could do not to rear up on my hind legs and bellow out a challenge t
o the world.

  Her voice was all honey and poppy juice, sweet and tempting at the same time. I looked at the other two hes. Hylaeus and Nessus were both staring back at me, as if certain I would try to cheat them out of what was rightfully theirs. They knew what they wanted, all right, and they did not care what they had to do to get it.

  I glanced over at the siren. Her eyes had slit pupils, like a lion’s. They got big and black as a lion’s when it sights prey as she watched us. That put me on my guard, where maybe nothing else would have. “Careful, friends,” I said. “She does not ask because she wishes us well.” Roughly, I answered the siren: “Taking food for ourselves and our comrades.”

  By the way she eyed me, we had no need of food; we were food. She said, “But would you not rather share it with me instead?”

  That voice! When she said something might be so, a he’s first impulse was to do all he could to make it so. I had to work hard to ask the siren, “Why should we? What payment would you give us?”

  I have lived a long time. One of the things this has let me do is make a great many mistakes. Try as I will, I have a hard time remembering a worse one. The siren smiled. She had a great many teeth. They all looked very long and very sharp. “What will I do?” she crooned. “Why, I will sing for you.”

  And she did. And why I am here to tell you how she sang . . . That is not so easy to explain. Some small beasts, you will know, lure their prey to them by seeming to be something the prey wants very much. There are spiders colored like flowers, but woe betide the bee or butterfly who takes one for a flower, for it will soon find itself seized and poisoned and devoured.

  Thus it was with the siren’s song. No she of the centaur folk could have sung so beautifully. I am convinced of it. A she of our own kind would have had many things on her mind as she sang: how much she cared about the hes who heard her, what she would do if she did lure one of them—perhaps one of them in particular—forward, and so on and so on.

  The siren had no such . . . extraneous concerns. She wanted us for one thing and one thing only: flesh. And her song was designed on the pattern of a hunting snare, to bring food to her table. Any doubts, any second thoughts, that a she of our kind might have had were missing here. She drew us, and drew us, and drew us, and . . .

  And, if one of us had been alone, she would have stocked centaur in her larder not long thereafter. But, in drawing Nessus and Hylaeus and me all with the same song, she spread her magic too thin to let it stick everywhere it needed to. Nessus it ensnared completely, Hylaeus perhaps a little less so, and me least of all. Why this should be, I cannot say with certainty. Perhaps it is simply because I have lived a very long time, and my blood does not burn so hotly as it did in years gone by.

  Or perhaps it is that when Nessus made to strike at Hylaeus, reckoning him a rival for the charms of the sweetly singing feathered thing, the siren was for a moment distracted. And its distraction let me move further away from the snare it was setting. I came to myself, thinking, Why do I so want to mate with a thing like this? I would crush it and split it asunder.

  That made me—or rather, let me—hear the siren’s song with new ears, see the creature itself with new eyes. How eager it looked, how hungry! How those teeth glistened!

  Before Nessus and Hylaeus could commence one of those fights that can leave a pair of hes both badly damaged, I kicked out at the siren. It was not my strongest blow. How could it be, when part of my blood still sang back to the creature? But it dislodged a few of those pearly feathers and brought the siren’s song to a sudden, screeching stop.

  Both my comrades jerked as if waking from a dream they did not wish to quit. They stared at the siren as if not believing their eyes. Perhaps, indeed, they did not believe their eyes, their ears having so befooled them. I kicked the siren again. This time, the blow landed more solidly. The siren’s screech held more pain than startlement. More feathers flew.

  Hylaeus and Nessus set on the siren then, too. They attacked with the fury of lovers betrayed. So, I daresay, they imagined themselves to be. The siren died shrieking under their hooves. Only feathers and blood seemed to be left when they were done. The thing was lighter and more delicately made than I would have thought; perhaps it truly was some sort of kin to the birds whose form and feathers it wore.

  “Back to the ship, and quick!” I told the other two hes. “The whole island will be roused against us when they find out what happened here.”

  “What do you suppose it would have done if you hadn’t given it a kick?” Hylaeus asked in an unwontedly small voice.

  “Fed,” I answered.

  After that one-word reply, neither Hylaeus nor Nessus seemed much inclined to argue with me any more. They carried away the gutted stag at a thunderous gallop I had not thought they had in them. And they did not even ask me to help bear the carcass. As he ran, Nessus said, “What do we do if they start—singing at us again, Cheiron?”

  “Only one thing I can think of,” I told him.

  We did that one thing, too: we took the Horse of Bronze well out to sea. Soon enough, the sirens gathered on the shore and began singing at us, began trying to lure us back to them so they could serve us as we had served one of them. And after they had served us thus, they would have served us on platters, if sirens are in the habit of using platters. On that last I know not, nor do I care whether I ever learn.

  We could hear them, if only barely, so I ordered the hes to row us farther yet from the land. Some did not seem to want to obey. Most, though, would sooner listen to me than to those creatures. When we could hear nothing but the waves and the wind and our own panting, I had the whole crew in my hands once more.

  But we had not altogether escaped our troubles. We could not leave the island behind without watering the ship once more. Doing it by day would have caused us more of the trouble we had escaped thus far by staying out of earshot of the sirens. For the creatures followed us along the coast. Had some foes come to our shores, slain one of our number, and then put to sea once more, I have no doubt we should have relentlessly hounded them. The sirens did the same for this fallen comrade of theirs. That she had tried to murder us mattered to them not at all. If they could avenge her, they would.

  As the sun god drove his chariot into the sea ahead of us, I hoisted sail to make sure the sirens on the shore could see us. Then I swung the Chalcippus’ bow away from the island and made as if to sail for the mainland lying southwest.

  “You are mad,” Oreus said. “We’ll bake before we get there.”

  “I know that,” I said, and held my course.

  Oreus kept on complaining. Oreus always complains, especially when he cannot find something to trample, and not least because he never looks ahead. It could be that he will learn one day, I thought. It could also be that he will never learn, in which case his days will be short. To my sorrow, I have seen such things before, more often than I would wish.

  A few of the other hes likewise grumbled. More, though, paid me no small compliment: they gave me credit for knowing what I was about. Now I had to prove I had earned their trust.

  The sun set. Blue drowned pink and gold in the west. Black rose out of the east, drowning blue. Stars began to shine. There was no moon. Her boat would not sail across the sky until later. “Raise the sail to the yard, then lower the yard,” I said, and pulled the steering oars so that the Chalcippus swung back to starboard.

  “Very nice,” said Nessus, who seemed to understand what I was doing.

  “Is it? I wonder,” I replied. “But we have need, and necessity is the master of us all.” I raised my voice, but not too loud: “Feather your oars, you rowers. We want to go up to the shore as quietly as we can. Think of a wild cat in the forest stalking a squirrel.”

  At that, even Oreus understood my plan. He was loud in his praise of it. He was, as is his way, too cursed loud in his praise of it. Someone must have kicked him in the hock, for he fell silent very abruptly.

  In the starlight, the sea was dark and g
limmering. An owl hooted, somewhere on the land ahead. I took the call as a good omen. Perhaps the sirens did as well, the owl being like them a feathered hunting creature. I have never understood omens, not in fullness. I wonder if ever I shall, or if that lies in the hands of the gods alone.

  From the bow came a hiss: “Cheiron! Here’s a stream running out into the sea. This is what you want, eh?”

  “Yes,” I said. “This is just what I want.” Few folk are active by night. Fewer still are active both day and night. I hoped we could nip in, fill our empty jars, and escape the sirens without their ever realizing we were about.

  What I hoped for and what I got were two different things. Such is the way of life for those who are not gods. I have said as much before, I believe. Repeating oneself is a thing that happens to those who have lived as long and seen as much as I have. And if you believe I have troubles in this regard, you should hear some of the gods I have known. Or, better, you should not. A god will tell the same story a hundred times, and who that is not a god will presume to let him know what a bore he is making of himself ? Only one of great courage or one of even greater foolishness, for gods are also quick to anger. And, however boring they may be, they are also powerful. Power, after all, is what makes them gods.

  My hes scrambled out of the Horse of Bronze. They set to work in as sprightly a way as any captain could have wanted. But they had not yet finished when another owl hooted. As I have remarked, owls crying in the night are said to be birds of good omen, but not this one, for his cries alerted the sirens. I do not understand omens. I have said that before, too, have I not?

  The sirens rushed towards us, fluttering their winglike arms and then—far more dangerous—commencing to sing. For a bad moment, I thought they would instantly ensorcel all of us, dragging us down to doleful destruction. But then, as if a god—not, for once, a boring god—had whispered in my ear, I called out to my fellow hes: “Shout! Shout for your lives! If you hear yourselves, you will not hear the sirens! Shout! With all the strength that is in you, shout!”