There’s a tremendous cultural gulf between the Athilantans and the rest of the Stone Age world. It’s incredible. They are so far beyond everybody else here in all ways that I can’t even begin to explain it. A mutant race of supergeniuses that mysteriously arose out of nowhere during the late Paleolithic Era? That sounds too hokey to be believed. But what other explanation can there be?
The King and the Prince also discuss local matters at their morning conference. They decide which government officials deserve promotions and which need to be reprimanded for slacking off. They talk about street repair and new building construction. They make plans for upcoming religious festivals. None of this is very romantic. It’s just their job—ruling the Athilantan Empire. And it’s a lot of work, which never eases off.
Lunch is light: some grapes, some cheese, and the strange bread, hard as rock, that they make out of the wheat that grows here. Wheat is still in its early evolutionary stages and such wheat as they have isn’t very different from grass seed. But even that is amazing, considering how far in the past we are. Still, it doesn’t make remarkably good bread. The Prince drinks a light white wine with lunch, as sweet as perfume. Ugh.
Then a nap. And then he goes off for afternoon exercise: horseback riding, javelin throwing, another swim, and the like. He’s a terrific athlete. You’d have to be, to ride the horses they have in this era—mean little guys, short legs, long manes, angry dispositions. They’re wild animals and they don’t pretend otherwise. The Athilantans understand the principle of the saddle but they don’t know anything about bridles and bits, and their technique for controlling their horses is basically to grab them around the necks and wrestle them into submission.
After exercise, there’s usually some ritual to perform. This is a very religious country, in its way. The place swarms with priests and priestesses of the various gods. All these gods constantly demand worship. The various rituals invariably involve the King and the Prince, because the King of Athilan is not only the monarch but also the high priest, and the Prince is his right-hand man. So they have to put in an hour or so in this temple or that one almost every day, presiding over these godly matters. The chants and prayers they utter are highly stylized and I don’t have a clear idea of what they mean. A lot of animal sacrifice goes on, too. I still don’t find that very easy to take.
In late afternoon the whole royal family gets together for a kind of relaxation hour, warm and affectionate, everybody funny and loving. Then they have dinner together, a terrific feast. The servants are mainlanders. (Slaves, I suppose. I have to keep reminding myself not to expect the Athilantans to abide by all our nice modern democratic institutions, like freedom. Like the Romans, like the Greeks, like a lot of advanced civilizations of antiquity, the Athilantans don’t seem to see anything wrong with enslaving people. It’s always a surprise, isn’t it, when people who seem generally enlightened, like the Athilantans, turn out to practice something as cruel and wrong as slavery. But the past is the past, and things are different there, and no use expecting it to be otherwise. At least they seem to treat their slaves pretty well, for what that’s worth.)
There’s food galore at these royal feasts, a simply incredible amount of food, usually with a roasted ox as the main event, and amazing quantities of wine. (But everybody seems to stay sober. Is the wine very weak, or do these people have unusual tolerance for alcohol?)
Minstrels come in and sing when dinner is over. The favorite is a long historical epic, something like the Iliad and the Odyssey rolled into one. It sounds very stirring, but it also happens to be snug in some ancient version of the Athilantan language, and it’s as hard for Prince Ram to understand as Chaucer’s English would be for us. I can get only the vaguest drift of it, something about exile and wandering and the eventual building of this great city on the island of Athilan.
Listening to the minstrels gives me a wonderful feeling of what it must have been like to sit around the banquet hall in ancient Greece, listening to Homer strumming on his lyre and chanting the first editions of his poems. But then I have to tell myself that Greece isn’t ancient yet—that it won’t even exist as a concept for another 17,000 years and some— and that Homer, Achilles, Agamemnon, and the rest of that legendary crowd are unknown figures of the unimaginably misty future, so far as the Athilantans are concerned.
It gets dark early here. The Prince goes to sleep when the minstrels are finished, and sleeps like a marble statue until the first rays of dawn.
Or, at least, would sleep like a marble statue if I didn’t insist on hauling him out of bed somewhere during the night so that he could write the letters for me. Of course he’s completely unaware of that. I keep the letters hidden in a leather case underneath a stack of old togas that he doesn’t seem to wear any more. Whenever I hear that a courier is about to set out for Naz Glesim, I put the Prince into trance and have him get the current letter and pack it up for shipment. I wonder, of course, if any of my letters will ever get to you. The distances are so great, the situation so tricky. But I have to keep on writing them. I need this contact with you so very much—even one-sided as it’s been up till now.
I wish I had some way of dictating my impressions of this world into a recorder that I could take back to Home Era with me. The big trouble with being a disembodied web of electrical impulses, I keep thinking, is that you can’t carry anything across time with you except the contents of your own mind. Better than nothing, but pretty frustrating all the same. I’d like to come home with bulging notebooks describing everything I’ve seen here, and maybe a suitcase or two of Athilantan artifacts. No way, though. No way at all.
Time to go. Ram’s writing hand is cramping badly. He needs to rest. And, I think, so do I.
—Roy
6.
Day 5, Month of Western Wind, Year of Great River.
Almost a week since my last letter. I haven’t wanted to write. Strange things have been going on in my mind and I didn’t particularly care to talk about them, hoping they’d vanish of their own accord. But they haven’t.
What’s happening—not to be mysterious about it any longer—is that I’ve been feeling a powerful urge to let Prince Ram know I’m here.
I realize that this is a classic malady of time-travelers. The compulsion to stand up and shout, “Look at me! Look at me! I’m sitting right here inside your head!” There’s even a name for it, isn’t there? Observer Guilt Syndrome, I think. But knowing that I’m not the first one to experience this doesn’t make it any easier for me.
The thing is that I have now spent several weeks observing-Prince Ram at the closest possible range. I feel closer to him than any friend or wife could ever be. I know which side of his mouth he prefers to chew his food on, which god’s name he takes in vain when he stubs his toe, and the details of the really nasty trick he pulled on his kid brother when he was nine years old. (And which he still feels guilty about, although Prince Caiminor was only four at the time and probably doesn’t remember a thing.)
All this is producing the predictable Observer Guilt reactions in me. Maybe you’re feeling a little of it yourself. I talked about this a few letters back—when I compared being an observer to being a spy, and said that it felt a little ugly. But it’s starting to seem like something a lot worse than spying, now. It feels like being a Peeping Tom. A spy, at least, is serving his country. Peeping Toms are simply slimy.
I know, Lora, I know, I know. I’m serving the cause of knowledge by doing what I’m doing. And my training is supposed to help me get past these expectable feelings of guilt and shame.