Anyway—picking up where I left off so many hours ago—
We are obviously moving into subtropical seas. Even in the Ice Age, it seems, the midsection of the world had pretty decent weather, much rainier than it is in Home Era but not particularly cold. There’s a springtime tenderness in the air that everyone aboard ship is responding to. The Prince and his whole retinue have been on the chilly mainland more than a year, and they’re as eager to get back to Athilan as I am to see it for the first time.
This afternoon the Prince was working on a report to his royal father about the current status of Athilantan trading posts on the mainland—evidently the thing that he was sent to Europe to investigate. There was a map open on his desk as he worked, and I was able to see the whole layout of the empire.
Incredible!
They’ve got outposts strung all along the southern half of Stone Age Europe as far east as Russia, and down into North Africa and the Middle East. Most of the trade is done by sea, but a network of roads links everything together inland. It’s awesome how they have it all connected, couriers going back and forth over an elaborate network of highways. (No, I don’t think they use automobiles—all I saw while I was in Brittany were chariots, some drawn by small, sturdy, fierce-looking horses, and some by what looked like enormous reindeer.)
And all this will be lost. All this will be totally forgotten,-as though it had never been. The memory of it will survive only as fable and myth, which no one will really take seriously until the coming of the age of time exploration. It’s heartbreaking to think about it.
The Athilantan highway system runs up as far as what I think is the middle of Germany, then zigs and zags through Central Europe, avoiding the most heavily glaciated areas. One of the roads goes straight to Naz Glesim, where you are,the easternmost outpost of the empire. It gave me a funny feeling to see that name on the map and know that you’re there at this very moment.
Thibarak, the coastal trading post where I was, in Brittany, is a sort of headquarters for the imperial mainland operations—at least the Western European branch. Couriers go back and forth between Thibarak and Naz Glesim all the time, bearing directives from the home government and reports from the provincial governor. The trip takes a couple of months each way. I should be able to slip these letters into the diplomatic pouch, and if you really did make it into the mind of Provincial Governor Sippurilayl as they planned it when they did the preliminary time-search, you’ll eventually get to read them. Or not, as the case may be. Try to arrange it so that Governor Sippurilayl sends letters back to Prince Ramifon Sigiliterimor. That way I’ll see them sooner or later. Then, of course, we both will have to wipe out of our carriers’ minds all memory of the strange messages in unknown gibberish that they keep getting from each other. But with practice that won’t be too hard.
I think we’ll reach Atlantis in another four days or so. At sundown the Prince was standing on the deck wearing only a light tunic and mantle, and soft warm breezes were blowing out of the south.
Poor Lora! You must be freezing your butt off out there on the barren Russian steppes while I sit here telling you about the sweet springlike weather we’re enjoying. Well, I don’t mean to rub it in, you know. It was just the luck of the toss that sent me to Atlantis and you to Naz Glesim, and I’m well aware that a mere matter of heads instead of tails and I’d be the one stuck in the back woods right now. And next trip it may be the other way around for us.
(A pity that they won’t ever send us to the same locale when we make these jumps. I know, I know, they want to spread us out over the maximum territory. The best we can hope for is to go to the same era but in different geographical regions. Which I guess is better than nothing. As they told us when we volunteered for this, time travel works best when two people who have a strong emotional connection are sent out as a team. And they’re right. Simply knowing that you’re here—thousands of miles away, sure, but in the same era—gives me a warm, comfortable feeling. And that helps immensely in fending off the terrible isolation that would otherwise come with knowing that I’m so distant in time from everything and everyone that I care for. All the same, I’d like to be able to see you once in a while. I’d like to be able to touch you. I’d like to be able to—oh, well, never mind. At least I can write to you. And maybe one of these days the courier will get back from the eastern part of the empire and there’ll be a letter from you to me.)
Meanwhile Atlantis gets closer every second.
Until then—give my regards to all my good friends in Naz Glesim, if there happen to be any, which I doubt.
Miss you miss you miss you miss you.
—Roy
4.
Day 27, Month of New Light, Year of the Great River— Atlantis, Lora! I’m in Atlantis!
The island of Athilan, I should say. It came into view in the middle of the night, while Prince Ram slept. There came a whistling at the door and they woke him up, because he had to perform the Ritual of Homecoming. We went out on deck. And then at last I saw it, gleaming in the moonlight right in front of us.
It’s a lofty island, rising high out of the Western Atlantic. The great mountain in the middle, which is called Mount Balamoris, is as I think you know the volcano that sooner or later is going to blow this whole place to oblivion. Later rather than sooner, I profoundly hope. But obviously Mount Balamoris has been inactive for hundreds or even thousands of years, and a fantastic city has been built on its vast slopes and down along the broad plain that runs to the sea.
What was on my mind as we made our final approach to Atlantis was the description of it that Plato gave in his dialog Kritias, which you and I studied while we were in training. That Atlantis was a “continent,” rich and beautiful, with an abundance of trees and shrubs, flowers and fruits, animals both wild and tame, and precious minerals. And that the capital city, on the southern coast, was a huge metropolis, fifteen miles around, having the form of two circular strips of land divided by three wide canals, with great walls of stone, bridges, towers, and palaces. At the center of the city was a holy quarter within an enclosure of gold, where the temples were covered with gold and silver and their roofs were made of ivory.
I can hear you reminding me that nobody in modern times takes Plato’s account seriously as history. Well, yes, I know that. I haven’t forgotten that he wrote it around 355 B.C. and even he says that Atlantis had been destroyed 9,000 years earlier. Which means he can’t possibly have any hard data about it, because 9,000 years before Plato’s time Greece was deep in prehistoric darkness. I’m aware that it’s been the general scholarly belief for a long time that Plato probably made the whole story up himself—that all it is is a fantasy, just a pleasant work of fiction.
But is it? I wonder. Now that I’ve had a look at Atlantis with my own eyes, I’m not so sure that Plato was simply making it all up from scratch.
One thing we know, thanks to time exploration, is that Atlantis actually existed. As recently as the twentieth century it was thought to be purely mythical. But no: we have proof now that a spectacularly great island-city really did exist in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean thousands of years before Plato’s time, and that it really was destroyed by a gigantic cataclysm. So it certainly isn’t beyond belief that memories of the place and its horrendous destruction might have passed into legend, or that tales of fabulous Atlantis could have been told and retold for generation after generation, across time immemorial. And some confused bits and scraps of those ancient legends might still have been circulating in the Mediterranean region at the time when Plato lived.