The Rings of Poseidon (13 page)

It was a mixed party with, as far as I could
see, about eight adult males and six adult females, with a handful
of children and no old people at all. I listened to them from the
bushes and decided they must be from further towards the direction
of the rising sun because, although I understood most of what they
were saying, they seemed to have a noticeable accent.

I listened further and gathered that there
had been two parties originally. One mixed lot had left their
village, probably because it had become too large, but whether they
had chosen to leave or been forced out was not clear from what I
heard. They may well have been forced, because the men must have
been a pretty weedy bunch. When they'd run into a small band of
hunters the men in the party had been either killed or driven off
and the women given no choice about making up a new group.

The one who was more or less their leader was
not a very interesting looking individual as a man, being rather
large and unkempt. He was busy throwing out contradictory
instructions and orders, and he appeared to have a couple of women
too which, considering the imbalance of the party, was not a
sensible arrangement. He was not appealing to look at, but my
biggest objection to him was that he appeared stupid. His choice of
campsite was random and he did little besides shout his orders. I
thought that his second in charge looked younger, more presentable
and more intelligent. I thought I could handle being his woman if I
could get rid of the leader of the group. I glanced back at my
daughter. At eleven she was still more child than woman but she was
maturing. Could I make her enough of a woman to attract the
attention of the stupid lump who was the present leader of the
group? I turned back to watch and listen.

Hunters they may have been, but they
obviously knew nothing about being hunted because they were
frustratingly unaware of anyone else. I dared not be too obvious
because I wanted to get their leader alone and I would not be able
to do that if I aroused their suspicions. The question was how to
get him on his own.

I darkened Mayapec's eyelids with kohl, which
I was rather reluctant to do, since I hadn't much and the chances
of meeting a trader out here are almost nil, so I wouldn't be able
to acquire any more. Next I reddened her lips with berries. They
could have done with being riper but, as they don't keep from one
season to the next, I hadn't any old ones left. I made sure there
were some left for me, because I would need them later, then
braided Mayapec's hair and sat her in plain view of anyone entering
our shallow valley, while still close to cover I could use. I hoped
it would work because I valued my fingers!

I took my sling and an oxbone knife with a
good stabbing edge on it, but I had simply no idea how on earth to
get him up the shallow bank to my vantage point. He sat on a fallen
tree at the edges of the camp like a largish tangle in humanity's
hair and still gave everyone else his orders. It was then that I
had my piece of luck - he went into the bushes to relieve himself.
I still had to sling three pebbles to get him to look in the right
direction and even then my plan, such as it was, almost fell
through because he was such an idle lump. I think he was almost too
idle to investigate a woman alone. It certainly wasn't suspicion or
caution because once he started towards Mayapec he didn't exercise
even ordinary care. He just walked over to her, looked her over,
said "Hello woman," and started to pull her clothes up to mate
her.

I would rather have given Mayapec a gentler
introduction to mating and, anyway, I think she's a bit young to
have offspring yet, so she can find herself a man later to live
with. One who would give a lot more thought to her pleasure than
this lump was doing. Mayapec didn't like his attentions much and I
don't blame her, but I waited until he was well into the business
before I came out of the bushes and stabbed him. He got himself out
of Mayapec and rolled over to reach for his knife, so I stabbed him
again.

All in all it was a rather messy but not
noisy job. Mayapec and I tidied ourselves up, braided our hair -
all the usual things - struck camp, loaded up the animals and went
to join the group by the river. I was quite looking forward to the
second in command promoting himself to chief and to being his
woman. As for the other women in the group, well, I could handle
them.

I smiled to myself, flexed my fingers now
that they were safe and felt the ring, conscious of it for the
first time since leaving my village. Perhaps I could use it help
establish a position of power. At any rate I urged the animals to a
shambling walk towards the camp by the river.

CHAPTER 10

The silence which followed Frank's story was
broken after several seconds, when Gill commented, "That seems to
settle any doubts about the ring's great age and squarely puts the
question we've been dodging."

"Which is?" asked Alicia.

"What," said Gill slowly and clearly, "was a
metal ring doing in the stone age. Not in the transition to the
bronze age. Not 'nearly' the bronze age, but far back. Well before
anything else metal was known."

"You know," said Alicia, "For a couple of
years now I've been worrying about that transition to the bronze
age, not that it's entirely relevant."

"Yeah?" Frank prompted her.

"Well, Bronze is mostly ninety per cent
copper and ten percent tin to help it keep an edge better," said
Alicia.

"So?"

"There has to have been a long period when
copper was used on its own. before anyone started experimenting
with alloys," said Alicia.

Gill couldn't see what Alicia was driving at.
"Perhaps there was some overlap," she said.

Steve, on the other hand, saw the point
straight away. "So some stone age bloke thought 'I'll melt some of
this rock and some of that rock and use the stuff I get from it to
make a sword'?" he asked.

"Exactly," said Alicia. "Of course there
would be overlap - there are still a few stone age peoples around
today. What I meant is that there isn't room in the accepted
chronology of human history for hundreds, perhaps thousands of
years of copper age.

"But," protested Gill, "I didn't know what
the ring was made of or, at least, the person I was in the stone
age didn't know." She turned to Frank. "And I'll bet you didn't
know either."

"No. Nor I did," said Frank. "Whoever it was
telling the story."

"You were a woman," said Steve, rather
obviously.

"Quite a ruthless one," added Gill, equally
obviously.

"Survival of the fittest," remarked Alicia,
"They were pretty ruthless times."

"Ah!" protested Gill, "but you'd expect a
woman to care what happened to her offspring, wouldn't you? That
woman more or less allowed her own daughter to be raped."

"Without condoning rape to-day, I don't think
she saw it that way at all," said Alicia. "What she did was use her
daughter's sexuality to bait a trap for everybody's good as she saw
it, and for her own ambitions too."

"The end justifies the means?" asked Gill,
almost derisively. "Anyway you're dodging the really mystifying
question."

Alicia sighed. "That's the one question mark
which puts everything in all the stories in doubt. Chronology tells
us for certain that the ring could not possibly have been handed
down from the past." She paused, looking both puzzled and
frustrated.

"All right," she continued, "Where did it
come from and how did it get where it was? What do you think
Frank?"

Apart from his one confused remark, Frank
hadn't said anything and looked lost in thought. His answer, when
it came, suggested that he had been reflecting rather than
listening.

"I said, 'What do you think, Frank?'"

"It's the Mayan problem only more so," he
answered obscurely.

"What do you mean?" asked Alicia.

"If you stargaze without instruments you've
got to do it hundreds, perhaps thousands of years to get the longer
cycles right and even eclipses come only once or twice in a
lifetime. To-day we live much longer but we still need to travel
long distances to observe them with any regularity. Predicting them
requires a high degree of accuracy, especially if you think the sun
revolves round the earth and don't realise an eclipse of the sun is
caused by the moon."

"I've read that the Mayans spent a lot of
time and effort on time and calendars," said Alicia.

"The Mayans didn't just spend a lot of time
on time, they were obsessed by it. They could reckon the length of
a solar year accurate to within an error of one day in six thousand
years. That's more accurate than anyone else until this century.
They could work out the length of a Venus year to within .08 of a
day. They had a calendar year of 260 days divided into 10 months
and in cycles of 20 years - that's more than eighteen thousand day
and month combinations. They didn't, as far as we know, have any
instruments to help them nor, as far as we know, did they have
'hours' or other subdivisions of the day. Remember too that we're
talking about people who didn't invent the wheel and only just
about reached the end of the stone age. But they did have a
nought."

"A nought?" queried Steve, listening and
thinking rather than talking.

"The Romans didn't have any concept of place
in columns of numbers," explained Manjy. "If you wanted to add,
say, three hundred and forty three, five hundred and fifty, forty
and nine hundred and thirty eight, you couldn't put them under each
other because you'd have a sum like this." and she wrote on the
back of an envelope:

CCCXLIII

DL

XL

CMXXXIII

"So you see," she added, "when the Indians or
the Arabsor whoever it was invented nine digits and a nought and
the concept of place, it was a big step forward."

"You can say that again," remarked Frank.

"And the Mayans had that concept as well?"
Alicia mused.

"Yeah, though they counted in twenties, so
they had nineteen digits and a nought."

"They were really sold on measuring time,
weren't they?" said Steve thoughtfully.

"You wouldn't believe how sold," Frank
continued. "They went to the trouble of working out cycles going
back four ... hundred ... million ... years. They carved calendars
on the sides of pyramids and when some enterprising archaeologist
stripped one of them off there was another pyramid of calendars
underneath. And another under that."

"They were totally obsessed with time," said
Gill. "I wonder why?"

"But the folks in my story knew a lot about
the cyclic nature of time too."

"Cyclic?" queried Steve, still listening and
thinking.

"Well I guess I should have said 'measurement
of time' rather than time itself. The Mayans measured time because
they believed everything that took place had happened before and
that by detailing the past they could predict the future."

"Astrology?" asked Alicia.

"Yes and no," Frank answered. "Like the
priest in my story. It wasn't just astrology, though that came into
it. There were three other things in my story that put me in mind
of the Mayans. The woman in my story twice mentioned losing a
finger if anything happened to her daughter. The Maya had a custom
which involved burying an adult finger with a child.
Coincidentally, so did a lot of tribes of American Indians and now
we have a similar custom mentioned in this story."

"Now that is odd," said Alicia, "Was this
story set in central America do you think?"

"I wondered that, but I don't think so. It
was warm but not hot and I seemed to be in the foothills of much
older mountains."

Frank thought about it. "If it was the
Americas at all it was somewhere like the southern Appalachians,
but it felt closer to the sea than that. Where the terrain is right
the climate is wrong. I'd say it was Europe somewhere. Maybe
France."

Steve was thinking about a book he had read
in the prison library. Gill was thinking about something else.

"The storyteller said that there was more sun
and less rain further ... I think she meant 'further north'. What
sort of weather had there been?" she asked.

"Funny you should ask. I think there had been
a long period of cold, overcast weather. Not a long period as in
several months, I'm talking about several centuries. Time out of
mind."

"I was wondering how far we'd gone. Could
this have been the end of the ice age?"

"I don't think so," said Frank, "I think
we're talking about heavily overcast weather, not ice."

"It would have to be a slow warming to be the
end of the ice age, I think." commented Alicia. "The glaciers came
as far south as Southern Britain at their height, but they began to
recede about twelve or fourteen thousand years ago."

"As a matter of interest," said Steve, "why
wasn't there a warmer area in western Europe where the Gulf Stream
warmed the land?"

"I've never really thought about it," Alicia
frowned. "I suppose there is some explanation but, now you point it
out, you'd expect the pattern of average temperatures to be the
same then as now. Lower, not different"

"But they weren't, were they?" said Steve,
"You could reasonably infer that the Gulf Stream didn't warm
western Europe because the Gulf Stream was diverted by an area of
land that existed then and doesn't exist now."

There was a longish silence broken by Frank.
"It would have to be a pretty large chunk of land to deflect ocean
currents."

Alicia changed the subject, just as Steve was
beginning to be really interested in hearing Frank's further
thoughts. "You said there a couple of other things in the story
which put you in mind of the Mayans," she said, "What were
they?"