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.