“We have missed you every day of your absence, and every hour of every day,” the King said. “We have asked the gods daily to preserve you and bring you safely back to us. And now our prayers have been answered.”
“Father. Grand Darionis. One King. My thoughts have ever been upon you while I traveled abroad.”
They touched fingertips, very quickly and delicately, in the formal Athilantan manner.
Then six priests appeared, leading out another aurochs, and father and son slaughtered the poor beast right then and there, each of them wielding one of those jewel-hilted swords. A fire was lit; the meat was cooked; the priests hacked chunks off the carcass and brought them to the King and the Prince, who fed each other with their own hands.
It was, I know, meant as a ceremony of renewed love. But to me it also seemed a bloody, barbaric business, and I was glad when it ended and the Prince and his father went side by side into the royal palace.
You would not easily believe the splendor of the place. The lavish draperies, the carvings in ivory and jade, the many-colored stone pillars and filigreed window openings— it’s your basic Arabian Nights palace made real. You look at it and your heart aches, because you can’t help telling yourself that all of it is doomed to wind up at the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean, buried under thousands of years of muck and silt. You stand amid all this fantastic dreamlike loveliness and you know that its days are numbered, that it’s not going to last beyond next month, or next year, or maybe next century at best, and it hurts to think about it. (The ruins of the palace must still be down there on the ocean floor somewhere! But could we ever find them? And would any shred of their beauty still remain?)
Each member of the royal family has a private suite of rooms within the palace. Prince Ram’s suite is in back, on the second floor, looking out over a courtyard and garden.It’s grand enough to make any king happy. I wonder what the King’s own rooms are like, if this is what a prince gets.
By this time Ram was so groggy with fatigue that I was having trouble making sense of his thoughts. Everything that was passing through his mind was reaching me in blurred and woolly form. He tried to pretend that he was fine, and for a time he and the King sat together in one of Ram’s rooms, discussing some important governmental matters that I couldn’t follow at all.
But it was obvious to the King that Ram wasn’t able to keep his eyes open, and after a little while he bade his son goodnight and left. The Prince ran through the usual set of end-of-day prayers in one almighty hurry and dropped down on his bed like a dead man.
I let him rest for half the night. But there was too much that I wanted to tell you. So I took control of him and we went looking for writing materials, and found them, and for the last two hours I’ve had him setting all this down on long strips of vellum. His mind is still asleep, so he’s getting the rest he needs. But he’s going to have an awfully sore hand tomorrow from this much scribbling. I think I’d better stop now, though. It’s close to dawn. Out where you are, thousands of miles to the east, the sun is already up. I hope you’re okay. And that you get a chance to see this fantastic place for yourself some day.
Signing off—
—Roy
5.
Day 36, New Light, Great River.
One more letter, sent off into the unknown. Will it reach you? Will you ever write back to me? Who knows?
I might as well admit it: I haven’t really been doing too well lately. Now and then I get spells when I begin to feel lost and gloomy here, cut off, out of contact with anything real. All too aware that what I am is a floating ghost implanted in another man’s body while my own lies sleeping in a laboratory at the other end of time.
And then I remind myself of what a privilege it is to be here—to have been allowed to conduct part of this amazing exploration of times lost and, so we all once believed, forever irrecoverable. To be experiencing the sights and sounds and wonders of this incredible era, an era of whose very existence we once had only the most pathetic distorted notions. How remarkable that is—how much I am to be envied—!
I suppose I don’t really need to be saying things like this to you. You’re in the same boat I am. Forgive me for being dull or obvious. These matters weigh on my mind.
Sometimes I wish we’d never volunteered for any of this, Lora, that we were back in our own real time right this minute, you and I walking hand in hand in the park, or running along the beach, or just sitting quietly together having a pizza. Ordinary trivial things that everybody takes for granted. Home Era is starting to seem unreal to me. I have to stop and remind myself what an ice cream sundae tastes like, or what kind of sound a guitar makes, or even—God help me—what color your eyes are. And then everything starts to cut pretty close.
Well, the moods come and go. They can’t be helped.
But I know we’ll get home eventually, if everything goes right. There’ll be plenty of time for pizza and ice cream then, and all the rest. Meanwhile the basic thing to remember is that we’re in the middle of the most fantastic adventure anybody could imagine. There you are in Stone Age Europe with mammoths walking around on the tundra—and here I am waking up every morning to the golden sunlight of fabulous Atlantis—
How could anybody dare to feel gloomy even for a moment, doing what we’re doing? The idea’s practically obscene.
Busy days here. Lots of new information.
This is what I’ve learned about the Athilantan system of government in the past few days:
The King is an absolute monarch, and I mean absolute. Whatever he says, goes. There’s no council of nobles, no senate, nothing that remotely challenges the King’s authority. He’s got courtiers and bureaucrats, sure, but the whole empire is essentially his own private property, to rule as he pleases.
It sounds like a recipe for disaster. Certainly such an arrangement always has been, in historical times. No empire can hope to have an unbroken string of capable rulers. This king or that one might be all right, and maybe as much as a century can go along without any troublemakers reaching the throne. But sooner or later some madman is bound to come along, a Nero or a Caligula or a Hitler, somebody who won’t be able to handle absolute power, who runs amok and causes terrible chaos.
Why hasn’t it happened here? How has the Athilantan empire managed to survive for so many hundreds of years without producing a power-crazed tyrant who brings everything crashing down?
The clue, it seems, is in the title that they give the King. Grand Darionis literally means The One King, and by that they mean that he is the only king that Athilan has ever had. The present ruler is considered to be the reincarnation of everyone who has ever held the throne, all the way back to the time of the first Harinamur who founded the kingdom back in legendary times. When each king dies, all his memories pass into the soul of his successor, so that he embodies the accumulated wisdom of the entire dynasty. Or so they say. I don’t yet know if that’s literally true, or just a picturesque way of asserting the strength of tradition here. I can tell you that the look in King Harinamur’s eyes is not a look I have ever seen in anyone else’s. He seems almost superhuman.
I think this One King business is at least in part responsible for the unusual degree of closeness that exists between the King and Prince Ram.