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I Alpha

Chapter I

Section Alpha

 Speak of Oceans four,
 Named as better seas,
 Mighty Tethys, a gemed with isles,
 Little Rhea, filled with wiles.
 Southern Europa  raged with storms
 Northern Persophone, hanted with worms.

Geography Eudieke 4:1:1-6

Long Count Date: 998.11.90

The light of late afternoon was rich, and the paper soft to the touch in its own richness. The quill, mal-luck, was blunt and scratched and even screeched and sputtered to copy the lines. There hung, hither and thither, blots and trails. It ruined any effect of grace which the writer had attempted. Geography was, of course, a one of the Lesser Course, that drone of first year students at the great University of Teloikpolis, which she had avoided for two years and was finally faced with. A course that seemed to consist entirely of making poor copies of poor verse, which codified that which almost every child knew by heart. It seemed a weary and wearing occupation for someone young and in full bloom of both senses and sensuality. So, she leaned her head on her hand, elbow resting on the table, and stared at the results of the work.

She knew that as ye write, so must ye scratch. And began the laborious process of lifting the ink from the paper with the bit of sponge, wishing that she, like the master, could scribe and scatter the fixing agent over it like salt without a second thought. The chith had built up in the quill, and needed to be extracted, the fine fibres of paper poked into her had and left slivers finer than any wood in her right smallest finger which needed to be soothed.

And so she prepared to begin again. But instead her eyes wandered outside the open portal that looked out over the water – the light blue arm of a sea, which was the arm of a sea, which was an arm of the Ocean Persephone. Thus that ocean seemed to her to be a mysterious lure, she had touched its waters, but had never seen it. Nor had she seen the strange peoples that lived upon it, only hearing that they sailed beyond the horizon in triangular rigged vessels that traded far and wide, though not to the four corners of the world.

But it was, for the moment, back to Esios and his interminable recounting of every detail, and every union and all of the beginning back to the striking into the first place, from which grew out the Stone Tree. It is not as if this was, in some physical sense true, though, of course, the superstitious believed the old formula of “as writ, so done”. But they were only among the poor since there had been the tribulations.

But the sun beckoned, and the light would pass so quickly into night that she could not bear to let it go. She had last slept a night, so the light was precious, because she would sleep the next day. She should be using it studying, but, instead, she pushed back the chair, which made a deep wooden scraping sound on the stone floor, and went down the spiral steps from her small room to the main hall.

Having lived here long enough, the slate grey and heavy steps no longer seem strange to her, she had grown up in a single floor house with a courtyard that was open to the air, as the rooms could be here if one pulled back the canvas. But she had not understood why the heaviness of construction, it seemed the most difficult thing to accept – she was used to white walls of plaster and sunny yellow decorations – not grey stone and black volcanic rock. She was used to subtle texture on everything – not the smooth polish that walls and floors had here. The walls of that black granite like rock were almost shiny enough to be mirrors, and the grey floors we even to the touch – the stones interlocked together so tightly that there was no need for mortar.

She learned that this was “the new building” made with special techniques in a style that copied a city found in the jungles that were somewhat to the south. The savants of the University studied the strange buildings, built on rising rock pinnacles out of the mist and tangle of green vegetation, but knew not who made them. But they did know that there were useful properties for them. Properties which young students like her self tried to pry out of older students, but would get only maddeningly vague replies.

She bounced down the main hall, and then down the steps to the lower level, and then out. She looked back on the building – the outside was the grey stone, and it rose up five floors – each twice as large as a normal level. The high ceilings in side, because of the dark, did not seem so high, but outside with the spine of rooms pointing upward, and the whole “U” shape of the architecture visible, she realized that she slept some 100 feet in the air, it was almost dizzying.

But the postmeridian was upon her, and she new she did not have long – day, on this world of Ishtar, lasts less than 19 earth hours, and light is always almost evenly divided between day and night that is only 9 and one half of the hours that you would be familiar with. To her, of course, there were 24 hours in a day – 12 of day, 12 of night, It was the habit of Isthari to stay awake a day and a night, and then sleep the next day or night. But night was to be avoided for going out, because there was no artificial light for most. It is not that they did not know lamps and fire.

It is that they were forbidden in all but special rituals or circumstances. Ishtar is a world rich with sulfur, where fire could level a city in minutes, and burn the air out of lungs – and so, for most, it was a world without fire. On the theatre was excepted, and that because the cult of fire in the city had made great efforts to secure it, down to the necessity of shedding ones cloths before entering the enclosed ampitheatre.

Since she had slept not long before, and awoke before dawn to dress, she was still active and happy and full of alert energy, and the wind off the water cooled the heat, which, since days were shorter, did not go to the heavy oppressiveness one would expect of a tropical environment. For Teloikopolis, the city where the university was set, was almost directly on the equator. The inlaid stone of the square between the five new buildings – laid out in a pentangle – was white marble, and reflected the glare light back up, but was cool to the touch – underneath it flowed an underground river, feed by deep springs that made it ever cool, and often damp to the touch.

She ignored the glare, and in a few minutes was off into the yellowish grass of the first field, and away from the chattering noise of other conversations. It was here that her pace slowed, and she began to simply look at the stalks of grass, at the spiders that spun their webs between them, and feel the buzzing sound of innumerable dragon flies that swarmed over the grass to catch and eat the small flying insects that came here to mate and lay their eggs at the roots of the grass and bushes.

This day was like every other, and any other, for there were no seasons here, save when storms would blow in from the south, though these were few and of such gentle nature that “storm” seemed hardly the word.

A fragmentary movement caught her eye, and there it was, a butterfly, with black and yellow stripes. She marveled how it could look it was just a patch of grass in the stalks. Then she saw near by punching on a low leaf a ruby red beetle, and tried to recall its name. She knew that it’s colour was clearly a warning, and that she probably should not touch it, lest it have some irritant. But the color made her marvel for a moment.

And at that moment there was a thump and a loud bang, like the sound of gunpowder going off. She had not noticed the swiftly gathering clouds, nor the source of the bright flash of light. The rush of air knocked her two the ground, and she sat there, hips on the earth, arms behind her to catch her fall, and feet splayed out. One of the small bushes was burning with a blue fire. Normally this would have alarmed her tremendously, since, on Ishtar, were sulfur is in almost every thing that grows, that fire would be spreading rapidly. And yet she just sat, as if too amazed to move, and the fire seemed to jump off in wisps of blue glow.

There was a whitish aura around the whole bush, and there was a cold heat – she could not describe it to herself, because she was not familiar with heat lamps. It was like the sun just after coming out of the ocean’s cold – warm, without warming the air. And then, as mysteriously the glow died, and the bush was there, stripped of its leaves.

It was at this moment that fear and excitement, pushed her to her feet, she stood up and ran back towards the lecture halls. Surely this was something new, and something that should be shown to someone. She did not know what it was, but she was sure that it would be worth naming.

Her feet raised dust as she hit the soil quickly and she almost stumbled as she made the transition back to stone, it was not long afterward that, panting, she interrupted a speaker in the middle of a lecture, and breathlessly called out that something new had happened. There were two dozen students, and before the lecturer – a thin man with a reedy voice named Sophseus, who was, never the less, an encyclopediac font of facts, and a well of common sense – could tell her to sit, he glanced, saw that the student’s minds were wandering from [[Aristotle?]] anyway, laid down the scroll, and said “Dismissed, except those of us who want to see what has this lady so excited.” He said it in that tone that implied there was no joking about it.

She nearly bounced as she led them to the field, where they saw the leaf bare bush, and the clear signs of scorching, but without any sign of a fire having taken off. Sparks make fire, everyone was taught that as a child. Here it had not. Sophseus examined the bush, took out gloves, handled it, and took samples. He was grave in noting aloud his observations, and in the ever swiftly tilting sunlight, one student took notes.

“The rest of you can go, but I am hoping that you, young lady, slept the night, for you will not sleep this one.”

In fact, she was not going to sleep well for sometime to come.