The Ivory Star

Chapter 3

Eric and Angus made outstanding students, even though Jandus was a poor teacher. Over the course of several days, they managed to develop a rudimentary speaking vocabulary. Jandus's amazement at their intelligence managed to show through his miasma of arrogance, even as he ridiculed them for their ignorance of society and customs. The many long hours were fraught with countless harsh stares if a word was mispronounced or the wrong verb tense used, but the students quickly learned to ignore him and concentrate on the language.

The spoken language was remarkably similar in structure and vocabulary to the ancient Germanic Terran languages, such as English and German, but had many pronunciations similar to Welsh. The written language was again similar, with an alphabet of twenty characters, which appeared to be a mishmash of descendants of Roman, Greek, and Nordic characters.

With this information in mind, Eric and Angus managed to come up with several wildly different theories on the origins of the people on this world. Perhaps this was some long lost human colony from the early days of space exploration, gone to the medieval dogs. Perhaps he and Angus had passed through a space-time rift to land on an Earth of some alternate reality. They had yet to see a map of any sort, even though they searched the library in Jandus's absence. They wanted to see landmasses and oceans and rivers, in a perhaps vain attempt to recognize this world on which they found themselves. Perhaps this world, totally isolated from Earth, had evolved a species and culture so remarkable similar to Earth that differences in the scheme of things were insignificant. This led to discussions of convergent evolution, the idea that worlds having no contact with each other would naturally develop species and mechanisms most favorable to nature, most likely to succeed. This latter idea was thrown out when they found that the people called their world 'Eorthe.' This lent more credence to the first idea, and so on, and so forth, ad infinitum. The ramifications of any of those theories were staggering. So they gave up, at least temporarily, on trying to solve the mystery, and concentrated on learning as much as they could in hopes of surviving.

One day, Eric asked Jandus, "Those three stars we can see during the day, do you have a name for them?"

Jandus's eyes narrowed. "What do you mean?"

"What are they called?"

Jandus's hawkish features tightened like vise, and his mouth cinched into a hard line. "I will not be made a fool of!" He rose of to his full height, speared them both a gaze of pure malice and contempt, and stalked out of the room.

"At last!" Angus said. "I was getting tired of watching him out of the corner of my eye to see if he was sneaking around to put knife in my back."

"I wonder what I said."

"Probably something to do with those three stars. In a culture like this I'll bet they have a huge mythical and cultural significance. Like Stonehenge, or the Great Pyramids, or the Sun and Moon religions of old Earth. I mean, we can only be foreigners, right? Not aliens! How could we not know about them?"

"He thought I was mocking him."

"Whatever. Good riddance, I say. I've just been humoring him the last two days anyway. Maybe we can find something about them in one of these books."

So they spent the rest of the day, trying to extract information with their limited knowledge of the written language. Most of the books appeared to be histories, lineages, family trees, all of them very old. Angus speculated that the newest of them had to be over two hundred Earth years old, judging by the leather binding, the ink, and the parchment. They found no mention of the length of the year, or how these people segmented the time. The dates that were mentioned were only the year, and counted from what event they did not know.