The Dancer from Atlantis Read Online Free PDF Page A

cicatrices must have been made deliberately, since they formed looping patterns. Beneath them,
     the features were heavy, big hook nose and flaring nostrils, thick lips, high cheekbones, sloping forehead, slitted eyes.
     The skin was a weatherbeaten olive, the whole effect more Armenian or Turkish than Mongol.
    Oleg had been rumbling in his whiskers.
‘Nye Pecheneg’
he decided, and snapped:
‘Polovtsi? Bolgarni?’
    The rider took aim. Reid saw his bow was compound, of laminated horn, and remembered reading that a fifty-pound draw would
     send an arrow through most armor. ‘Hey!’ he exclaimed. ‘Easy!’ When the horseman glowered at him, he repeated the introductions;
     then, pointing to the shimmering cylinder, he acted out his bewilderment and motioned to include Oleg and Erissa.
    The rider made up his mind to cooperate. ‘Uldin,
chki ata
Günchên,’ he said. ‘Uldin. Uldin.’ Stabbing a begrimed fingernail from one to the next, he Worked on their names till he
     had those straight. Finally he indicated himself again – all the while keeping his bow handy – and uttered a row of gutturals.
    Oleg caught the idea first. He made the same gesture. ‘Oleg Vladimirovitch,’ he said. ‘Novgorodski.’ He pointed and questioned:
     ‘Duncan?’
    Who are you? Not you personally; what people do you belong to? That must be it. ‘Duncan Reid. American.’ They were as bemused
     as everyone else was by Erissa’s ‘Keftiu.’
    For her part, she seemed astonished and hurt that Reid was not more responsive to her. She slipped off to recover her knife.
     He recognized the metal as bronze. And the iron of yonder arrowhead was precisely that, wrought iron; and Oleg’s equipment
     was either plain iron too or low-carbon steel, and when you looked closely you saw that each ring, each rivet had been individually
     forged.
    And at the end of a sentence, Uldin was saying of himself, ‘– Hun.’
    He did not pronounce the word in Anglo-Saxon wise, but it rammed into Reid. ‘Hun?’ he gulped. Uldin nodded, with a wintry
     grin. ‘At – Attila?’ That drew blank; and, while Oleg tugged his beard and appeared to be searching his memory, the name clearly
     had no deep significance for him, and none for Erissa.
    A Russian who felt his nationality was less important than the fact he hailed from Novgorod; a Hun to whom Attila meant nothing;
     a Keftiu, whatever that was, whose gaze lay with troubled adoration on … on an American, snatched from the North Pacific Ocean
     to a desert shore where nobody else had ever heard of America The answer began to break on Reid.
    It couldn’t be true. It mustn’t be.
    Because Erissa was nearest, he reached toward her. She took both his hands. He felt how she shivered.
    She stood a bare three inches under him, which made her towering if she belonged to the Mediterranean race that her looks
     otherwise bespoke. She was lean, though full enough in hips and firm breasts to please any man, and long-limbed, swan-necked,
     head proudly held. That head was dolichocephalic but wide across brow and cheeks, tapering toward the chin, with a classically
     straight nose and a full and mobile mouth which was a touch too big for conventional beauty. Arching brows and sooty lashes
     framed large bright eyes whose hazel shifted momentarily from leaf-green to storm-gray. Her black hair, thick and wavy, fell
     past her shoulders; a white streak ran back from the forehead. Except for suntan, a dusting of freckles, a few fine wrinkles
     and crow’s-feet, a beginning dryness, her skin was clear and fair. He guessed her age as about equal to his.
    But she walked like a girl, no, like a danseuse, like a Danilova, a Fonteyn, a Tallchief, a leopard.
    His smile wavered forth anew. She put aside both her trouble and her worship and smiled shyly in return.
    ‘Ah-hmph!’ Oleg said. Reid released Erissa, clasped hands with the Russian, and offered a shake to the Hun, who, after a second,
     accepted. He urged them by