The Prince’s name is Ramifon Sigiliterimor Septagimot Stolifax Blayl, which means, approximately, Beloved of the Gods and Light of the Universe. But nobody calls him that, because it would be sacrilegious. I learned it by rummaging around in the basement of his memory. His parents call him Ram, which is short for all the rest. His brothers and sisters call him Premianor Tisilan, which means First of the Family.Everybody else calls him Stoy Thilayl, which means Your Highness.
He is eighteen years old, dark-haired and olive-skinned, and very strong, with enormous shoulders and forearms. He’s shorter than he’d like to be, though—in fact, not very tall at all, even by Athilantan standards—and he’s not too happy about that, though he knows it can’t be helped. Generally he seems good-natured and very capable. Some day, if all goes well for him, he’ll become Grand Darionis of the Island of Athilan. Or, in other words, King of Atlantis.
I wonder what he’d think if he knew that his magnificent island of Athilan, which has built such a glorious empire and rules the entire Ice Age world, is doomed to be destroyed in another few hundred years. So thoroughly destroyed, indeed, that the people of future ages will come to think of its very existence as nothing more than a pretty myth.
For that matter, I wonder how he’d react if he were to learn that the people of future ages are sending observers back across a gulf of nearly twenty-one thousand years to find out something about this Athilantan Empire, and that one of them is currently sitting right inside his own mind.
Well, I’m not likely to discover what he would make of that. The last thing I’m going to do is tap the Prince on the shoulder and say, “Hi, Prince, guess who’s here!”
I hope that everything is fine for you out in the frozen hinterlands. I think of you all the time and miss you more than is really good for me. Write to me, if you can. Tell me everything that’s happening to you. Everything!
More later.
Much love—
—Roy
2.
Four days have gone by since my last.
I mean four of our 24-hour days, not the half-day “days” that the Athilantans use. We’re still here on this barren, frosty coast. The Athilantan ships are waiting in Thibarak harbor to take us to the island, but there are all sorts of rites and rituals that have to be performed first. Mainlander people in startling numbers—there must be thousands of them—have turned up to bid farewell to the Prince as he makes ready to set out for home. I suppose it isn’t a common thing to have a prince of the royal blood visiting here. And so every day we have bonfires blazing, bulls being sacrificed, chanting going on and on. Prince Ram presides over it with terrific aplomb. It’s plain that he’s been raised from childhood to rule the empire, and he knows exactly what needs to be done.
But though I haven’t been able to budge yet from my starting point, this place, provincial as it is, has plenty of fascination of its own. Maybe it isn’t glittering wonderful Atlantis, but it’s the past, Lora, the remote and weird prehistoric past!
It’s astonishing just being here. Every minute brings something new. I want to turn to you and say, “Look at that, Lora! Isn’t that incredible?” But of course you aren’t here. You’re way over there in eastern Europe. If only we could have made this trip together! (I know, I know, we are together, sort of. But I’m here and you’re there, instead of our both being in the same place. And don’t bother telling me that it would be unnecessary duplication of resources to send two observers to the same place as well as the same time. I know all that. I still wish you were here, close enough for me to talk to every day.)
But since you aren’t, I’ll tell you what I’m learning. And one of these days maybe I’ll be lucky enough to hear what you’ve been up to, too.
The difference between the Athilantans and the mainlanders is enormous. I don’t just mean the cultural difference, which is even wider than the gap, say, between the Romans of Caesar’s day and the savages who lived in the forests of Germany and France. That was Iron Age versus Bronze Age; this is Iron Age versus Stone Age. But I mean the physical difference. You must be seeing it, too. They’re two different types of people altogether.
Correct me if I’m wrong, but my impression is that the mainlanders here at Thibarak are the people that archaeologists call the Solutreans, who lived in this part of Europe a couple of thousand years after Cro-Magnon times. These Solutreans are tall, slender, fair-haired people with a sort of Viking look about them. They wear leather clothes very finely stitched together, and they use stone tools that look pretty elegant to me, long and thin and tapering, with a lot of fine little chip-strokes around the edges. Mostly they make their homes in shallow caves or beneath shelters of overhanging rock, though I see from Prince Ram’s mind that in the warmer seasons they also build little flimsy wickerwork huts for themselves.
The Athilantans are nothing remotely like them in any way.
The island folk tend to be much shorter and stockier than the mainlanders, with dark hair and somewhat swarthy skins. Their eyes are brown or black, never blue. It’s basically a Mediterranean look, Greek or Spanish, and yet there’s something not quite convincingly Greek or Spanish about them that I can’t put my finger on. Their cheekbones have an oddly slanted look, their mouths are a little too wide, the shape of their heads is a little strange. Maybe you’ve noticed it too, even though there are only five or six Athilantans out there in Naz Glesim, and I have hundreds to observe here.
My theory, for what it’s worth, is that the Athilantans actually are the ancestors of the Mediterranean folk of our Home Era, but modern Mediterranean people look a little different from Athilantans because of the changes that have taken place during all the thousands of years of evolution and interbreeding since the destruction of Athilan. I realize, though, that that’s only a guess and may be very wide of the mark.
What amazes me most is how advanced the Athilantans are, technologically speaking, over the mainlanders. Atlantis really was a magical kingdom! It’s almost unbelievable, when you stop to think about it—a wealthy and far-flung maritime empire that understands the use of iron and bronze, a civilization at least as advanced as those of Greece and Rome, way back here in the Upper Paleolithic Era!
How strange that archaeologists have never found any of their artifacts. No bronze swords or daggers mixed in with Cro-Magnon stone tools, none of their sculpture, no fragments of the buildings they erected on the mainland of Europe at outposts such as the ones you and I are currently at. Part of the answer, I guess, is that even though modernworld archaeologists have been digging up ancient ruins in a serious way for the past few hundred years they’ve still only scratched the surface of the buried remains of the ancient cultures and simply haven’t had the good luck to come across any Athilantan artifacts so far. And maybe bronze daggers will rust beyond discovery in twenty thousand years, whereas stone tools last forever. But that can’t be the whole explanation.
Well, I have a theory about that, too, Lora.
What if—after the fall of Athilan—the oppressed people of mainland Europe arose and systematically rounded up every last trace of their Athilantan masters, every weapon and tool and bit of sculpture they could find, and carried the whole business out to sea and dumped it all? Every scrap. Out of some tremendous vindictive urge they blotted the Athilantans from the face of the Earth. And twenty thousand years of ocean silt did the rest.