Search: A Novel of Forbidden History (32 page)

“Just don’t tell them about the aliens.”

Roz smiled. “What makes you think they don’t already know?”

Late that night, the scholars stood in silence as Stoneworker Apprentice Atlan counted aloud in the center of the observatory ring. Other than the young female’s strong voice, the only sound was the rippling of the dark cloth that wrapped the encircling sun stones, covering all the sighting gaps but one. For the accuracy of this test, the night breeze must not be allowed to deflect the weighted cord Atlan swung as a pendulum, her arm braced on a small wooden frame.

“Three hundred sixty . . .” Atlan neared the critical stage of her count. “Three hundred sixty-one . . .”

Her instructor, Stone Master Nazri, stood several steps behind his student, monitoring her count of each full swing of the pendulum she held, following her sight line to see what she saw. The elderly scholar, frail and, at twenty-five years, stooped with age, wore a white cloak so the other scholars could see him despite the darkness of the new moon. All the torches and lamps had been extinguished to allow the apprentice’s eyes to remain sensitive for her task.

Nazri raised his hand so the other scholars would know: The next few counts would be close.

“Three hundred sixty-two . . .” There was no hesitation in Atlan’s voice, no indication that, in only moments, she might achieve the reward of four years of study, or be forced to wait another year for her advancement. “Three hundred sixty three . . . three hundred sixty-four . . .”

Nazri raised both hands as if to frame his student.

“Three hundred sixty-five . . . three hundred sixty-six and gone!”

At the same instant, Nazri swept both hands down, indicating that the timing star had indeed moved behind the right-hand wooden post and disappeared at the moment his apprentice’s pendulum completed its 366th full swing.

Now it was only a matter of handiwork for Atlan to complete this final test.

As if this were simply an ordinary day and another lesson, the young apprentice, almost twelve, walked with measured pace to a cutting table, the leather soles of her woven footwear crunching against the dry ground of the viewing yard. Two younger apprentices were there with oil lamps, which they quickly lit with fire moss kept smoldering in metal cages. Other apprentices went purposefully from torch stand to torch stand, bringing light to the circular yard.

Ten days earlier, Atlan had constructed her sight line and timing gap. With little more than fine rope, sharpened wooden stakes, and some marking tools, she had drawn an arc of a great circle in the finely packed soil of the yard. The length of rope she had used to draw the arc was the radius of the circle. When she then pulled that rope taut between two points on the arc, the section of the arc created in that fashion equaled one-sixth of a full circle—exactly 61 of the 366 degrees by which the star path masters measured the great circle of the sky. One degree for each sunrise in a year.

With other lengths of rope and wooden stakes, she had used basic geometry to further divide a portion of that arc into its individual degrees, resulting in two sighting posts exactly one degree apart.

It was a known fact that a pendulum of a given length always completed its swings at a constant rate. So the challenge Atlan faced was to precisely measure a length of fine cord that would make a pendulum that completed 366 full swings in the time it took a star to move between the sighting posts—one 366th part of a day. In time to come, that span would be measured as three minutes, fifty-six seconds.

For her final test, one that would elevate her from apprentice to master, Atlan had been allowed ten nights to refine the length of the cord. Then, this night, she demonstrated to her master and the scholars of the observatory the preciseness of her craft.

Atlan pulled her cord straight atop the cutting table, using sharpened iron awls to mark the length of it on a polished rod of fire-hardened wood. Then, with a serrated, carved bone saw, she cut the rod to the exact length of the pendulum cord.

She presented the rod to Nazri, and the wizened scholar took it to a round stone altar. On the stone, an iron rod rested in a shallow trough that precisely fit it. An apprentice builder carefully removed the iron rod, then used a whisk of feathers to be sure the trough was free of dust and debris.

Oil lamps glowed and sputtered at the edges of the altar stone as the other scholars gathered around it.

Nazri gently lowered the wooden rod into the trough.

It fit exactly.

Atlan had demonstrated that she could travel anywhere in the world and with a few simple tools create a precise unit of measure that would allow her to construct observatories and libraries and outposts, according to common plans and known facts.

The other scholars, having seen the result, went back to their studies.

Nazri gave his student the highest praise possible. “Well done.”

She bowed her head, apprenticeship at an end. “Master.”

He gestured with a trembling hand to have her look up at him. “No. We’re the same now, Stone Master.”

Atlan drew in a breath at hearing that title. She knew what was to come, but had no idea what it might mean.

The next morning, Atlan met with Nazri and three other stone masters outside the observatory’s central chamber, set apart from the other low stone buildings of the scholars’ community. The plaster walls of the structure glittered in the brilliant summer sun—tiny flecks of mica mixed with the yellow pigment produced a sparkling point of light, not for decoration, but for distant ships approaching during daylight. The wind was heavy with the promise of rain later in the day. At this hour, though, the sky was a brilliant blue, the clouds small and distant and pure white.

Atlan, now wearing the cloth trousers, cloth shirt, and stiff leather protective apron of a stone master, breathed in that morning air as if noticing it for the first time. The day felt new to her. Her life was about to begin again. On that hilltop of baked white soil and rock, looking out over the interior ocean that one day would be called the Mediterranean, she believed she could see the curve of the world, believed she could feel the world spinning in its endless dance among the other bodies of the sky, as timeless and predictable as the swinging of a pendulum and the known facts of geometry.

Her studies had made her part of the pattern of all that was known, and all that was still to know. There could be no greater fulfillment.

“Are you ready?” Nazri asked her.

She clicked her answer.

“Then the doors are yours to open. Paid in blood.”

Atlan was puzzled by her former master’s words. Knowledge sometimes demanded a heavy price. Bridge ships could disappear forever on voyages of discovery. Inland expeditions set out, never to return. But to wayfinders and star path masters on solid land, where was the danger?

The other masters stepped aside in silence. Atlan approached the doors of the central chamber, placed her hands under the wooden crosspiece that kept them secure, lifted it—and cried out in surprise and pain.

Blood pulsed from a lattice of shallow cuts on her palms and fingers.

She looked to Nazri, but he had no sympathy.

“You said you were ready.”

Atlan had come too far to give up now, or question those who had taught her, and anger was not in the nature of the
khai
. She turned back to the crosspiece and found there was nowhere she could place her hands to avoid the thin blades lining its underside.
The price of knowledge,
she thought. So Atlan lifted the crosspiece, knowing that because of the pain, she would remember this day forever. And perhaps that was the reason for it.

The doors gave way.

There was a stone meeting table in the center of the torchlit chamber. The domed ceiling held the familiar constellations of the White Island. The encircling wall held a map of the world, clearly marked with trade and transportation routes, though
some were different from the ones she knew. Still, Atlan had been in enough similar chambers to wonder why this one was open to star path masters only.

As Nazri bound her wounds with strips of white linen, the other masters placed a wayfinder’s case on the meeting table. The curved wooden chest was larger than any Atlan had seen before, and the silver panels inset into it were somehow different. The star patterns she saw on one specific panel made no sense at all.

“What kind of case is that?” she asked.

Nazri finished tying the linen around her bloodied hands. “An old one.”

The masters worked the strips of wood that locked the case, sliding one after another in the proper sequence to release its lid.

Without ceremony, they swung open the hinged top of the case. Inside, Atlan was intrigued to see, there were no standard wayfinder’s tools. No lenses, no cords, no horizon boards. Instead, there was a large roll of vellum.

The masters placed the roll of supple leather on the table and removed the case.

“Unroll it,” Nazri said.

With hands made clumsy by her bandages, Atlan untied the cord that kept the vellum bound. She smoothed it on the table, seeing many other dark dried streaks of what she presumed was blood from other new masters who had also fallen victim to the bladed crosspiece.

On the vellum was a map, faint in the torchlight. From the texture of its markings, Atlan saw it was a rubbing. The thin hide had been placed over a relief map, then shaded with charcoal.

“It’s an island,” she said. In her mind, she rotated the outline of it, trying to match it with other islands whose outlines she knew. Something about it was familiar but, as with the altered details on the world map that surrounded her, Atlan couldn’t quite place the differences.

The other masters stood silent, watching, expressionless.

“Look closer,” Nazri said.

Atlan lifted a corner of the parchment to improve the lighting on it. On one part of the island, she saw the faintest outline of a familiar cross—the mark of the Navigators. She felt a thrill of recognition.

“This is a rubbing from the Great Hall.”

“Look closer.”

Atlan was no longer aware of the throbbing pain in her hands. She had never been to the White Island, never seen the Hall of the Navigators itself nor the treasure that filled it. From her lessons, though, she knew each part of it in her heart, each map and chart and table memorized exactly. As the image of the Hall’s great map rose in her memory, she realized what was different about the surrounding wall map in this chamber. It wasn’t that the trade routes on it were unfamiliar—the outlines of the land were subtly changed.

With that realization, like lightning caught by a scholar’s spool of copper, Atlan suddenly recognized the outline on the vellum.

Her breath caught.

“You see it?” Nazri asked.

“It’s a map of Har Madhyh. This island.”

“But?” Nazri prompted.

“Har Madhyh is two islands—and this map shows it as one.”

This island on which the observatory had been built, which one day would be called Malta, had a sister island to the northwest, separated by a narrow strait less than a single stadon across—a quick boat ride or a short swim.

Yet this map, judging from its relief shading, showed the two islands joined as one, with a valley where the strait ran today.

As smoothly as the interwoven strips of wood had moved to unlock the unusual wayfinder’s case, Atlan pictured the known facts falling into position.

“This is how the Navigators saw Har Madhyh.”

“It is,” Nazri agreed.