On the Reckoning of the Years

Astra had to take care of business. She asked where the box stool was, received instructions, and shimmied down the rope to the box stool to get some relief. After she had mixed some orange peels in with the waste and closed the stool, she rinsed her hands and left.

She noticed a batch of papers on a table. They looked like a ledger of some sort. She was curious about the date. She had left late in 1223, and had guessed that somehow five years had passed. If they had not, then the Master had even greater power than she had at first thought, as he would have the ability to change the past as well as the future. Sabok might not have known the year, the Aqualarian way of calculating the calendar not being in common use north of the Shreken. Astra looked at the latest entires, hoping to see a date around 1228. 7 Autumn 1228. So it was the seventh day of the third season, and she had guessed the year right. That made sense at least. And the autumn season in semi-tropical Aqualaria did stay hot until around the median day of the season, the forty-fourth.

She thought a little bit about the Hespaniard way of reckoning dates. If her people did the same, it would be the nineteenth year of Queen Maia's reign. Before that, Queen Astoria reigned thirty-three years. And then before that was the year of three monarchs. How would the Hespaniards deal with something like that? Certainly her people's way of numbering the years was much more practical. And using the four seasons as well. Instead of using the periodic cycles of the great white Moon or of Nemesis (the smaller, low-lying, brown object in the night sky), her people used a more practical division of the year, the seasons - an eighty-eight day spring and autumn and a hundred day summer and winter.

It was time to go back up to the roof. Astra had a few impressions of Sabok. He indeed lived by his charm, but the fact that he was laying tiles in the hot sun showed her that his head was not totally in the clouds. And while court minstrals were notoriously obsequious and lazy, the fact that he wandered showed that he was in some degree independent. He might make an excellent travelling companion - if he were reliable. Why had he come to Aqualaria? Did he have a patron, or was he here as a spy? Or perhaps things had gotten so bad in the Hespan itself that he had fled to here? Or maybe, which Astra thought most likely, he just got the urge to see Aqualaria because it was there, and charmed his way past all the armies and just turned up here. As she climbed up to the roof, she thought, "Mister Sabok, you are going to give up the secret of why you are here. And if I can trust you, I promise that you will have some stories to tell after I cross swords with the Master."

Sabok was singing his work song when Astra came up. He looked up, and said, "I have a start on the next rank of tiles. So how shall we pass the time? A song, or a story, perhaps?"

Astra answered,

1. "How about a true story? About you? How did you come to be here?"
2. "I have a challenge for you. Tell me a story about ..."

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