Get that little distinction, Lora. The Prince has returned to the human realm.
I suppose we cant really blame the Athilantans for feeling-superior, considering that they live in amazing marble palaces with electric lighting and indoor plumbing while the rest of the world lives in crude Stone Age ways. Still, its going too far, I think, to insist that the Stone Age people on the mainland arent even human. Backward, yes, by Athilantan standards. But to say that they arent human? Thats sheer arrogance.
When you take into account how deeply the Athilantans seem to despise the mainlanders, my earlier notion about why there havent been any Athilantan artifacts found in any of the Paleolithic sites our archaeologists have excavated makes even more sense. If youve been ruled for thousands of years by a superior race that regards you as dirt, and suddenly the homeland of that superior race gets blown to kingdom come by a volcano, that gives you a good opportunity to rise up and kill all the surviving overlords. And then you might just want to take every last scrap of material belonging to your former masters that reminds you of your subjugationevery jar and dish and sculpture and even their tools, useful though they might beand dump it all in the ocean while youre at it. Makes sense to me.
We need to check it out via time-search. Once weve begun our studies of the actual destruction epoch of Athilantan history, we ought to try to find out what happened afterward on the mainland, whether there really was the kind of purge of the hated masters that Im suggesting. I think it stands to reason that there was, considering the ugly racist attitudes Ive started to uncover in the Athilantan culture.
Anyway: I ought to go on with my story. Im here to observe, not to judge.
The Ritual of Purification came to a glorious finale, with Prince Ram clambering into an alabaster tub filled with wine and honey and coming forth dripping wet while choirs of priests and priestesses sang hosannas. Servants robed him in a kind of toga of fine-spun white cotton trimmed with blue, which is what everyone wears here. (The white-and-blue color scheme, like the marble buildings with the fine stone columns, helps to reinforce the general Greek atmosphere of Athilan. As does the sunny springlike climate.) And off he went, with me watching goggle-eyed from my vantage point within his mind, down the whole tremendous length of the Concourse of the Sky on foot to pay his formal respects to his mighty father, Harinamur, Grand Darionis of Athilan.
The procession took all day. The Concourse of the Sky is lined on both sides by splendid majestic buildings of classical designits as grand a street as the Champs Elysees, or Fifth Avenue, or Piccadillyand people looked down from every window as the Prince went by. He was bareheaded and wore nothing but that toga and sandals. The sun was very strong as he set out, but by midday the sky darkened and the usual daily rain came, a terrific downpour. He didnt seem even to notice. I dont know how long a walk it was milesbut he never gave a hint that he might be getting tired.
And eventually he reached the imperial palace, a splendid-many-columned marble building that sits high up on a huge stone platform overlooking a great plaza, at the far end of the Concourse of the Stars.
He paused there, at the foot of a flight of what must have been at least a hundred immense marble steps, and looked up and up and up. At the top of this colossal stone staircase was a broad porch. His father the King was waiting there for him. And Prince Ram, who had just walked something like ten or eleven hours through the streets of the city to reach this place without resting even for a moment, unhesitatingly began to climb those hundred gigantic steps.
Hail, O One King, the Prince cried. Harinamur, Grand Darionis! And thenin a softer voice: Father.
Ram, the king said. And they embraced.
It was incredibly touching. Mighty father, invincible son: so happy to see each other again, so intensely happy. I was always fairly close with my own father, you know. But I never felt, with him, anything remotely like the powerful force of love that was passing between these two as they hugged, in full view of the Athilantan multitudes, on that gleaming marble porch atop those hundred giant stairs.
It was a little embarrassing, too, eavesdropping on Prince Rams feelings in this moment of reunion. But you have to force yourself not to think about things like that. As Ive said before, and hardly need to point out to you, being a time-traveler involves being a sneak and a snooper and an eavesdropper on somebody elses most private moments, and theres simply no way around it. Since we cant go to the past ourselves, we have to invade the minds of its inhabitants without their knowing it, and you cant pretend that theres anything very nice about that. But its necessary. Thats the only justification there is. If were going to salvage anything out of the vanished past, we have to do it this way, because this is the only way there is.
The King is the most awesome human being I have ever seen. In grandeur and presence and authority he is like a combination of Moses, Abraham Lincoln, and the Emperor Augustus. Hes very tall, particularly for an Athilantan, with long white hair and a thick, full, white beard. He has a look of such nobility and wisdom that you want to drop down before him and kiss his sandals. This day he was dressed in purple robes woven through with thread of gold and silver, and he wore a crown made of laurel leaves set on golden spikes.
With immense solemnity he took Prince Ram in his arms and held him close, and then he stepped back so that they could look in each others eyes; and in the Kings dark shining eyes I saw such warmth, such depths of love, that I actually felt sad and envious, thinking that no one else on Earth could ever have been loved by his father the way this prince was.
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 its your basic Arabian Nights palace made real. You look at it and your heart aches, because you cant 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 its 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 Rams suite is in back, on the second floor, looking out over a courtyard and garden.Its grand enough to make any king happy. I wonder what the Kings 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 Rams rooms, discussing some important governmental matters that I couldnt follow at all.
But it was obvious to the King that Ram wasnt 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 Ive had him setting all this down on long strips of vellum. His mind is still asleep, so hes getting the rest he needs. But hes going to have an awfully sore hand tomorrow from this much scribbling. I think Id better stop now, though. Its close to dawn. Out where you are, thousands of miles to the east, the sun is already up. I hope youre 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 havent 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 mans 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 hereto 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 ishow much I am to be envied!
I suppose I dont really need to be saying things like this to you. Youre in the same boat I am. Forgive me for being dull or obvious. These matters weigh on my mind.
Sometimes I wish wed 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 evenGod help mewhat color your eyes are. And then everything starts to cut pretty close.
Well, the moods come and go. They cant be helped.
But I know well get home eventually, if everything goes right. Therell be plenty of time for pizza and ice cream then, and all the rest. Meanwhile the basic thing to remember is that were in the middle of the most fantastic adventure anybody could imagine. There you are in Stone Age Europe with mammoths walking around on the tundraand 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 were doing? The ideas practically obscene.
Busy days here. Lots of new information.
This is what Ive 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. Theres no council of nobles, no senate, nothing that remotely challenges the Kings authority. Hes 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 wont be able to handle absolute power, who runs amok and causes terrible chaos.
Why hasnt 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 dont yet know if thats literally true, or just a picturesque way of asserting the strength of tradition here. I can tell you that the look in King Harinamurs eyes is not a look I have ever seen in anyone elses. 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.
After all, Ram is the heir to the throne. If I understand these things correctly, when it is his time to become Grand Darionis he will in effect become identical with his father. The King may already regard Ram as nothing more than a literal continuation of his own identity. And Ram may already have come to see himself as the actual reincarnation of the King, the older man in a new body.
I dont really know how this works, yet. Do they have a way of transplanting the entire memory files of the King into his son? (Or daughter. As in England, the throne usually goes to the oldest child, male or female.) If so, it has to be done while the King is still alive, right? Unless they do it in the moment of death.
Or possibly, theres no literal transfer of memory at all, and the whole concept is just a kind of convention, a political fiction, like calling the Emperor of China the Son of Heaven. If thats so, all the kings may have the same name, and they may be very closely imprinted with the beliefs and values of their predecessors, but they cant actually be regarded as identical to all the kings who have gone before them.
So far, Ive probed Ram very cautiously about this whole matter. It may be a really sensitive area for him, in which case he might become aware of me as I go poking around in his mind. Thats the last thing I need.
What Ive learned, though, seems to indicate that they really do have some way of merging minds, personalities, stored memories, and such. And its done in stages, each one marked with a big ceremony.
First comes the Rite of Designation, in which the young child is named as heir apparent. This is done at the age of ten.
Then theres the Rite of Joining, at thirteen. I dont quite understand what this is, but it involves creating some kind of deep bond between the ruler and his heir. My guess is that its the opening of a sort of mental conduit through which psychic impulses flow from the older one to the youngerthe beginning of the transfer.
The third step is the Rite of Anointing. That happens when the heir apparent is eighteen, which means the Anointing of Ram ought to be due to take place very soon now. In this, the Prince enters full adulthood and heavy responsibility. He receives certain mystic powers, which are so secret that not even Ram himself seems to know what they are yet. He gets to live in a palace of his own. And he becomes a kind of viceroy of the realm, a junior king, with areas of authority and obligation far beyond anything hes had to undertake before. Once this rite is performed, he is permitted to marry. Is expected to marry, as a matter of fact.
(As far as I can tell, Prince Ram, with the Rite of Anointing just around the corner, has no particular woman in mind to become his Princess. Perhaps shell be chosen for him by his father and her identity wont be made known to him until the official moment. Brrr!)
The fourth and final rite is the Rite of Union. This, I assume, is the ultimate transfer of identity from king to prince, as the time gets close for the handing over of the throne to the chosen heir. When this takes place, or how, I dont know. All details concerning this rite are buried so deeply in Prince Rams consciousness that Id need to do major excavation to get to them. Obviously its something he doesnt want to think about, or isnt allowed to.
What will it be like for me, I wonder, when Prince Ram experiences the Rite of Union? What will it feel like when all those additional mental impulses come flooding into his mind? Pretty chaotic, I imagine. I suspect itll be something like sitting up in the top of a tall tree while a hurricane is going on all around you.
But of course I might not even be here by the time he does the Rite of Union. Weve only got a six-month assignment here, after all. As I say, I have no way of telling how soon Ram is due for the fourth rite, but my guess is that its going to be more than six months down the line.
Some real mixed feelings here. On the other hand Im uneasy about the impact of the Rite of Union on me if Im still inside Rams mind when it happens. On the other hand I suddenly realize that Im hoping Home Era will let me stick around long enough to observe it, regardless of the dangers. The rite would probably give me answers to a lot of the questions Im starting to ask myself about Athilan. I dont want to be yanked back to our own time until Im good and ready to go. Until Ive soaked up everything I can possibly learn about this place.
But of course Ive got no control over that. When the times up, back to Home Era I go, whether or not I want to. I return to reality. I return to you. But I give up Atlantis. Dont misunderstand me, Lora. Id give anything to be with you again after this separation. And yet, and yetto be here for the Rite of Unionto have a ringside seat when all the accumulated memories of all the kings of Athilan go pouring into Prince Rams mind
Well, well see. Its entirely out of my hands. I dont care for that very much. There are times when I feel like a puppet on a string. Which I know is a dumb attitude. It was understood from the start that we were here only for a specific length of time and then wed be brought back to Home Era. That was the deal, and no use complaining about it now. All the same, I have a funny feeling that Im going to resent it when they yank me back, because its going to come just as something tremendously important is about to happen.
Why am I worrying so much? All this fidgeting and dithering about things?
Just lonely, I guess. Thinking of you. Missing you.Maybe sending emotionally connected pairs on these trips into the past isnt such a great idea after all.
The Prince is an active and vigorous young man, and his days are full ones.
Hes up at dawn. Prayers, first. (These Athilantans are very devout. They seem to have a couple of dozen gods, who are, however, all regarded as aspects of the One God.) Then, before breakfast, he swims in the marble-lined pool in the courtyard of the palaces rear wing. Fifty laps. ( Everything here seems to be made out of marble. Theres a big stone quarry somewhere on the far side of Mount Balamoris, but also they bring finer grades of marble in by ship from Greece and Italy.)
Breakfast, then. Fruits, most of them strange tropical ones that I cant identify, followed by roast lamb. And a rich, sweet red wine. Wine for breakfastwell, that isnt anything Id care to do. But the Prince is strong as an ox and it doesnt even make him a little bit tipsy. And these Athilantans, like all the Mediterranean peoples who I believe are descended from them, love their wine. There are vineyards all over the island. (All their wines are sweet. I know that real wine connoisseurs claim that the best wines are dry ones, but the Athilantans probably wouldnt care. They like it the way they like it. I suppose a Frenchman wouldnt approve, if there were any Frenchmen in existence. But there arent any yet. Nor are there any vineyards right now, over there in the icebound land that will someday be France. And there arent going to be for thousands of years.)
After breakfast Ram meets with the King. They go over all sorts of official documents and reports.
Most of what they deal with concerns the flow of raw materials that Athilantan ships bring in from Africa and southern Europe. These Athilantans are the worlds first imperialists. Theyve colonized every part of the world within reach, importing things they needminerals, mostly, but certain foodstuffs alsoand giving not very much in return. Of course there isnt much that they could give, considering how primitive all the other humans of this era are. Your typical modern-era colonial power imports raw materials from backward countries and exports manufactured goods, but semi-nomadic Stone Age hunters dont have a lot of need for light bulbs, fancy plumbing fixtures, or rubber tires.
Theres a tremendous cultural gulf between the Athilantans and the rest of the Stone Age world. Its incredible. They are so far beyond everybody else here in all ways that I cant 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. Its just their jobruling the Athilantan Empire. And its 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 isnt very different from grass seed. But even that is amazing, considering how far in the past we are. Still, it doesnt 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. Hes a terrific athlete. Youd have to be, to ride the horses they have in this eramean little guys, short legs, long manes, angry dispositions. Theyre wild animals and they dont pretend otherwise. The Athilantans understand the principle of the saddle but they dont 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, theres 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 dont have a clear idea of what they mean. A lot of animal sacrifice goes on, too. I still dont 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 dont seem to see anything wrong with enslaving people. Its always a surprise, isnt 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 thats worth.)
Theres 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 its as hard for Prince Ram to understand as Chaucers 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 isnt ancient yetthat it wont 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 didnt insist on hauling him out of bed somewhere during the night so that he could write the letters for me. Of course hes completely unaware of that. I keep the letters hidden in a leather case underneath a stack of old togas that he doesnt 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 mucheven one-sided as its 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 cant carry anything across time with you except the contents of your own mind. Better than nothing, but pretty frustrating all the same. Id like to come home with bulging notebooks describing everything Ive seen here, and maybe a suitcase or two of Athilantan artifacts. No way, though. No way at all.
Time to go. Rams 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 havent wanted to write. Strange things have been going on in my mind and I didnt particularly care to talk about them, hoping theyd vanish of their own accord. But they havent.
Whats happeningnot to be mysterious about it any longeris that Ive been feeling a powerful urge to let Prince Ram know Im 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! Im sitting right here inside your head! Theres even a name for it, isnt there? Observer Guilt Syndrome, I think. But knowing that Im not the first one to experience this doesnt 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 gods 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 doesnt remember a thing.)
All this is producing the predictable Observer Guilt reactions in me. Maybe youre feeling a little of it yourself. I talked about this a few letters backwhen I compared being an observer to being a spy, and said that it felt a little ugly. But its 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.