Alan Akers - The suns of Scorpio

I was quite prepared to accept this dismissal. I was tired. The bed was not too soft for comfortable sleep, and I slept; if I dreamed I no longer recollect what phantoms filled my mind. In the morning, after a fine breakfast, I went for a stroll along the battlements with the old man, whose name was Akhram. The name of the building too, he told me, was Akhram.

“When I die, which may occur in perhaps fifty years or so, then there will be a new Akhram in Akhram.”

I nodded, understanding.

Over the high parapet I could see, stretching out on all sides except for those where the Grand Canal and the sea cliffs hemmed us in, broad fields, orchards, tilled land, carefully tended agricultural holdings. This place would be rich. In the fields people labored, mere ants at this distance. Were they slaves, I wondered, or free?

I asked my usual questions.

No, he had never heard of Aphrasoe, the City of the Savanti. I forced down the pang of disappointment.

“I once saw,” I said, “three men dressed as you are, except that they wore scarlet ropes around their waists, with scarlet tassels.”

Akhram shook his head.

“That may be so. I know of the pink-roped Todalpheme of Loh, and we are the blue-roped Todalpheme of Turismond; but of scarlet-roped, alas, my friend, I know nothing.”

Turismond. I was on the continent of Turismond. I had heard of Turismond. Surely, then, Segesthes could not be far?

“And Segesthes?” I asked. “The city of Zenicce?”

He regarded me. “Did you not ask these scarlet-roped Todalpheme, yourself, what of Aphrasoe?”

“They were dead, the three, dead.”

“I see.”

We walked for a space in that wonderful streaming opaline radiance. Then: “I have heard of the continent of Segesthes, of course. Zenicce, as I am given to understand, is a not too popular city with the seafarers of the outer ocean.”

I made myself walk sedately at his side as we patrolled the battlements in the early morning suns-shine.

“And of Vallia?”

He nodded quickly. “Of Vallia we know well, for their world-encompassing ships bring us strange and wonderful things from far lands.”

I was as good as back with my Delia of the Blue Mountains. For a moment I felt faint. What of the Star Lords’ intentions now — if in truth it had been the Star Lords, the Everoinye?

Akhram was talking on and out of politeness, that which had been so earnestly drummed into my head by my parents, I forced myself to listen. He was talking about the tide they expected that afternoon. As he spoke, I understood what went on here and what was the service in which these Todalpheme were engaged. The Todalpheme, in brief, calculated the tides of Kregen, kept accounts, and reckoned up with all the old familiar sailor lore I had learned back on Earth. I felt a wonder at the kind of calculations they must do. For Kregen has, besides the twin suns, the red and the green, her seven moons, the largest almost twice the size of Earth’s moon. I knew that with so many heavenly bodies circling the tidal motions would to a very large extent be canceled out, the very multiplicity of forces creating not more and higher tides but fewer and less. Except when bodies were in line, when they spread evenly; then the spring or neap tides would be marvelous in their extent. Back in Zenicce I had seen the tidal defenses, and the way in which the houses along the canals had been built well above the mean water level. When tides ravaged through Zenicce tragedy could result, so the barrages, defenses, and gates were kept always in good repair, a charge on the Assembly.

Akhram told me that a great dam stood at the seaward end of the Grand Canal that connected this inner sea with the outer ocean. There were closable channels through the dam. The dam faced both ways. It had been constructed, so Akhram said, by those men of the sunrise — he said sunrise, not suns-rise -

in the distant past as they had faced and leveled the canal itself, so as to control the tidal influx and efflux from the inner sea.

“We are an inward-facing people, here on the inner sea,” he said. “We know that outside, in the stormy outer ocean, there are other continents and islands. Sometimes ships sail through the regulated openings in the Dam of Days. Vallia, Wloclef from whence come thick fleeces of the curly ponsho, Loh from whence come fabulous, superbly cut gems and glassware of incredible fineness: these places we know as they trade with us. Donengil, also, in South Turismond. There are a few others; otherwise, we remain willingly confined to our inner sea.”

Later I was allowed to visit the observatories and watch the Todalpheme at work. Much of what they did with ephemeris and celestial observation was familiar to me; but much was strange, beyond my comprehension, for they used what seemed almost a different kind of logic. They were as devoted to their work as monks to theirs. But they laughed and were free and easy. They showed a certain respect for my own understanding of the movements of heavenly bodies and the predictable movements of bodies of water, with tides and currents and winds and all the hazards thereto attached.

This inner sea was practically tideless. There was little wonder in this, of course (the Mediterranean tides never exceed two feet), and these dedicated men spent their lives calculating tide tables so that they might warn the custodians at the gates of the dam to be ready when the outer ocean boiled and seethed and roared in with all its power. I gathered there was no other navigable exit from the inner sea.

“Why do you live here, on the inward end of the Grand Canal?” I asked. Akhram smiled in a vague way and swung his arm in a gesture that encompassed the fertile soil, the orchards, the smooth sea. “We are an inward-facing people. We love the Eye of the World.”

When Akhram referred to the dam he called it the “Dam of Days.” I realized how much it meant. If the outer ocean got up into a real big tide and swept in through the narrow gut of the Grand Canal, it would sweep like a great broom across the inner sea.

That great Dam of Days had been built in the long-ago by a people now scattered and forgotten, known only by the monuments in stone they had built and which time had overthrown, all except the Grand Canal and the Dam of Days.

I saw a stir in the fields. People were running. Faintly, cries reached up. Akhram looked over and his face drew down into a stern-lined visage of agony and frustrated anger.

“Again they raid us,” he whispered.

Now I could see mail-clad men riding beasts, swooping after the running farm people. I saw a man stagger and go down with a great net enveloping him. Girls were snatched up to saddlebows. Little children, toddlers even, were plucked up and flung screaming into ready sacks. The long sword I had found by the thorn-ivy was below, in the room I had been assigned. I started off along the parapet. When I emerged by the massive lenken door it was just closing. A frightened rabble crowded in, the last just squeezing through the little postern cut in the main doors. I lifted the sword.

“Let me out,” I said to the men bolting and barring the doors.

I wore the green-striped material taken from the dead Chulik. I had been unable to don the hauberk or coif; my shoulders are broader than most. I held the sword so the men at the doors could see it.

“Do not go out,” they said. “You will be killed or captured-”

“Open the door.”

Akhram was there. He put a hand on my arm.

“We do not ask visitors for their names or their allegiances, friend,” he said. He stared up at me, for I am above middle height. “If they are your hereditary foes, you may go freely forth and be killed for your convictions. But I take you for a stranger. You do not know our ways-”