Poul Anderson: The Boat of a Million Years

“She’s a dear person, true. But she’s a barbarian.”

“That can be changed.”

Hanno shook his head. “Don’t play tricks on yourself, my friend. It’s not like you. Do you daydream about taking her along when we leave? If she survived the voyage, she’d wither and die in Massalia, like any uprooted wildflower. What could she make herself into? What sort of life could you give her? You’re too late. Both of you.”

Again Pytheas stood mute.

“Nor can you settle here,” Hanno told him. “Only think. You, a civilized man, a philosopher, crammed cheek by jowl with other human bodies and cattle into a wretched wattle-and-dab hut. No books. No correspondence. No discourse. No sculptures, no temples, no traditions of yours, nothing of all that’s gone to form your soul. She’ll age fast, your lady, her teeth will go and her dugs will sag and you’ll loathe her because she was the bait that trapped you. Think, I say, think.”

Pytheas free hand knotted into a fist and smote his thigh, over and over. “But what can I do?”

“Leave. She’ll have no trouble getting a husband who’ll raise the child. Her father’s well off by their standards, she’s proven herself fertile, and every child is precious, as many of them as they lose. Hoist sail and go. We came in search of the Amber Island, remember? Or if it’s a myth, then we want to find whatever the reality is. We have these eastern shores and seas to learn a little about. We mean to return to Pretania and finish circumnavigating it, determine its size and shape, for it’s important to Europe in a way that Thule can’t be for centuries. And then come home to your people, city, wife, children, grandchildren. Do your duty, man!”

“You ... speak harshly.”

“Yes. I respect you that much, Pytheas.”

The Greek looked from side to side, to the mountains athwart that sky which hid the stars in its light, down over woodlands and meadows, out across the shining bay toward unseen Ocean. “Yes,” he said at last. “You’re right. We should have departed long ago. We shall. I’m a graybeard fool.”

Hanno smiled. “No, simply a man. She brought a springtime you thought you’d lost back into your heart. How often I’ve seen it happen.”

“Has it to you?”

Hanno laid a hand on his friend’s shoulder. “Come,” he said, “let’s go back and try to sleep. We’ve work ahead of us.”

Weary, battered, faded, and triumphant, three ships neared Massalia harbor. It was a crisp autumn day, the water danced and glittered as if diamond were strewn upon sapphire, but wind was light and bottoms were foul; they moved slowly.

Pytheas beckoned Hanno to him. “Stand with me here on the foredeck,” he requested, “for it may be the last quiet talk we shall ever have.”

The Phoenician joined him in the bows. Pytheas was being his own lookout in this final hour of his voyage. “You can certainly expect a busy time,” Hanno agreed. “Everybody and his third cousin will want to meet you, question you, hear you lecture, send you letters, demand a copy of your book and insist you write it yesterday.”

Pytheas’ lips quirked upward. “You’ll always have a jape, won’t you?”

They stood for a bit, watching. Now as the season of the mariners drew to a close, the waves—how small and gentle, in this refuge from the Atlantic—were beswarmed with vessels. Rowboats, lighters, tarry fishers, tubby coastwise merchantmen, a big grain ship from Egypt, a gilt-trimmed barge, two lean warcraft spider-walking on oars, all sought passage. Shouts and oaths volleyed. Sails boomed, yardarms slatted, tholepins creaked. The city shone ahead, a blue-shadowed white intricacy overspilling its walls. Smoke blew in tatters from red tile roofs. Farmsteads and villas nestled amidst brown stubble fields, pastures still green, darkling pines and yellowing orchards beyond. At the back of those hills, a higher range lifted dun. Gulls dipped and soared, mewing, in their hundreds, like a snowstorm of the North.

“You will not change your mind, Hanno?” Pytheas asked.

The other turned grim. “I cannot. I’ll stay till I collect my pay, and then be off.”

“Why? I don’t understand. And you won’t explain.”

“It’s best.”

“I tell you, a man of your abilities has a brilliant future here—boundless. And not as a metic. With the influence I’ll have, I can get you Massaliot citizenship, Hanno.”

“I know. You’ve said this before. Thank you, but no.”

Pytheas touched the Phoenician’s hand, which grasped the rail hard. “Are you afraid people will hold your origin against you? They won’t. I promise. We’re above that, we’re a cosmopolis.”

“I am everywhere an alien.”

Pytheas sighed. “Never have you ... opened your soul to me, as I have to you. And even so ... I have never felt so close to anyone else. Not even—“ He broke off, and both -turned their glances aside.

Hanno took on his cool tone again. He smiled. “We’ve Been through tremendous things together, good and bad, terrible and tedious, frolicsome and frightening, delightful and deadly. That does forge bonds.”

“And yet you will sever them ... so easily?” Pytheas wondered. “You will merely bid me farewell?”

In a single instant, before Hanno summoned laughter back to himself, something tore apart and the Greek looked into a pain that bewildered him. “What else is life but always bidding farewell?”

To Yen Ting-kuo, subprefect of the Tumbling Brook district, came an inspector from QTang-an, on an errand for the very Emperor. A courier arrived beforehand, giving the household time to prepare a suitable welcome. Next noontide the party appeared, first a dust cloud on the eastern road, then a troop of mounted men, servants and soldiers, attendant on a carriage drawn by four white horses.

Pennons aloft, metal aflash, they made a brave sight. Yen Ting-kuo appreciated it the more against the serenity of the landscape. From his hilltop compound, the view swept down to Millstone Village, earthen walls, roofs of tile or thatch, huddled together along lanes where pigs and peasants fared, but not unsightly—an outgrowth, a part of the yellow-brown loess soil from which men drew their lives. Beyond reached the land. This was early summer, barley and millet intensely green on their terraces, dotted with blue-clad human forms at work. Farmhouses nestled tiny, strewn across distances. Orchards here and there were done flowering, but fruit was set and leaves full of sunlight. Willows along irrigation canals shivered pale beneath a breeze that smelled warmly of growth. Pine and cypress on farther ridges gave dark dignity. Right and left were heights used for pasture, whose contours stood bold out of shadow.

West of the village those hills steepened rapidly and forest covered much of them. The journey remained long and ever more difficult to yonder frontier, to the realms of the Tibetans and Mongols and other barbarians, but already here civilization began thinning out and one treasured it as perhaps no one quite could in its heartland.

but broke the old poem off and went back through the gate. Ordinarily he would have continued to his house and waited inside. To receive an Imperial envoy he placed himself and his sons, robed in their best, on the porch. Servants flanked me direct way to it across the outer court; elsewhere shrubs made a kind of maze conducting attention to a goldfish pond. Women, children, and menial workers were tucked away in other buildings of the compound.