When Ilika awoke in the late afternoon, most of the clearing was in shade and someone had put a dry blanket over him. He sat up and looked around.
Mati was by the corral, pulling grass and handing it to the donkey. A fire burned in the ring of stones near the shack, and Miko was arriving with an armload of wood. Sata waddled up from the stream with an old bucket, sloshing with water, and slid it under the corral fence.
As Ilika shook out his blanket, Kibi returned to the clearing with a large pile of mushrooms on an old board, and Neti followed, an assortment of fresh greens in her hat. Rini and Buna had bowls full of berries.
Ilika smiled as he wandered over to the fire. An old iron cooking pot held simmering water to which Kibi added mushrooms after scraping off the dirt.
“Ilika, we need to get some salt,” she said after greeting him with sparkling eyes and a smile.
He stood behind her and touched her hair. “And something we can take with us for a cooking pot. That thing looks too heavy.”
“It is. Did you find onions, Neti?”
“A few. We borrowed your knife to start the fire, Ilika.”
Ilika looked puzzled. “I’d like to learn that trick.”
“Miko can teach you,” Neti said with a proud smile.
“And since you guys can find food,” Ilika began, “we won’t have to leave here so soon.”
“We really need at least one more day to get everything dry,” Kibi said
thoughtfully. “And Mati has to figure out how to ride Tera.”
“Tera?”
“That’s the donkey’s name. It’s a jenny.”
Ilika frowned, remembering the kingdom’s rigid naming customs. “I know a priest who would wet his pants if he found out we were using a four letter name for a donkey. He’d probably try to have Mati arrested.”
All those around the fire burst out laughing.
“We reminded her about that,” Neti said, still snickering, “and she promised to use ‘Ter’ when we’re around other people. But Mati insists the donkey’s name really is Tera.”
Miko and Boro arrived with another sitting log, so Ilika moved out of the way and wandered toward the ruined cottage. Inside he found all the coin pouches open, slowly drying, each still containing a great gold piece. Seeing the tube of gold coins he had entrusted to Kibi, beside her comb and bottle of lice potion, made him smile. Most of the blankets and clothes were already dry and folded.
As Ilika wandered out toward the corral, he could hear laughter coming from his students at the fire circle and down by the stream. Mati was sitting on a stump talking to the donkey, so he approached.
“. . . and I’m going to brush you every day . . . who’s coming, Tera?” Mati turned her head. “Hi, Ilika! Tera, this is Ilika, our teacher and the captain of a ship.”
Ilika scratched the shaggy head that stretched through the rails. “Hello, Tera. You sure are a beautiful donkey. I bet you and Mati are going to have fun together.”
Mati grinned at Ilika’s acceptance of the donkey’s name.
“Do you know what she thinks of the saddle yet?” Ilika asked.
“No. Rini’s going in with me tomorrow to brush her, then see if we can put on the saddle and bridle.”
Ilika cleared his throat. “A bridle controls an animal by inflicting discomfort, even pain . . .”
Mati suddenly looked tormented. “I don’t want to do that! Tera’s my friend!”
“In that case, you could ride her with just a halter and reins, but it will take
more time and effort to develop a good working relationship.”
“I’ll do whatever it takes. I was a slave, and I’m not going to make my new friend into one.”
Ilika smiled. “Always remember, Tera is about a hundred times as strong as you.”
Mati chuckled. “Boro and Miko have worked around donkeys. They said never stand behind one if you value your life.”
“Sounds like wisdom to me. I think dinner is almost ready — hot mushroom soup.”
“Yum!”
When the sunlight left the clearing for the day, those who were not busy cooking brought in all the boots and saddlebags, then gathered around the fire. Working with two chipped ceramic mugs from the shack, they took turns with cups of soup, or munched on pieces of cheese and edible greens.
“We’re all wide awake. What are we going to learn tonight?” Buna asked cheerfully.
“I was just wondering that,” Ilika said. “Something we can study just sitting around the fire and talking.”
“How to ride a donkey . . .” Mati suggested, gazing into the flames.
“Sorry. You guys know more about that than I do. I had never seen a donkey until I entered your city. I can’t help with wild foods either. But I think I should teach you basic chemistry.”
“Oh! That’s like healer stuff!” Toli said excitedly.
“Healers work mostly with bio-chemicals, but don’t know the underlying chemistry.”
Ilika took a minute to consider his approach to the subject. “It all starts with energy, the smallest and simplest particles that have any effect on our world. We studied this back at Doko’s Inn, just before . . .”
“Radio!” Toli said with a proud look.
“Infrared,” Boro added calmly.
Neti’s hand shot up. “Light!”
“Ultra . . . violet,” Sata added, struggling to remember the words. “That’s why we use sun hats.”
“Very good. But energy isn’t always flying around like the radiation we’ve studied. Sometimes it settles down, organizes itself into families, little groups called atoms. One or more particles get together in the center. About the same number of a different kind whirl around the outside.”
“Like girls and boys?” Neti suggested.
“Roughly like that. The two different kinds are attracted to each other, but have different jobs to do. As soon as those energy particles get together to form an atom, matter is born.”
“Can you show us some?” Toli asked.
Ilika laughed. “There’s no way I could keep you from seeing it! Everything around you is made of matter, lots and lots of little, tiny atoms. Rocks, water, even something you can’t see like the air.”
Everyone looked thoughtful, almost disbelieving.
“Are they really little, like a speck of dust?” Sata asked.
“Much smaller. A speck of dust is maybe a million atoms. Each different kind of atom, because of the different number of particles, has different qualities. The one with six protons in the middle is carbon, the black charcoal in the fire.”
Ilika paused to drink from the mug of soup he was handed. Several students found a piece of cold charcoal to play with while saying the name.
“The element with seven protons is very different. It’s an invisible gas, called nitrogen, that makes up most of the air. Element eight, oxygen, is the other gas in the air.”
They tried to grab some air in their hands, without much success.
“Why can’t we see it?” Kibi asked.
“It’s just one of its qualities that light goes right through, just like gamma rays through our bodies. There’s one more I see right here. Much heavier, with twenty-six protons . . . iron.”
“The cooking pot!” Mati said proudly.
“Yes. Also black, but very different from carbon.”
The group sat in silence for a few minutes, some eating, some just gazing into the fire. Kibi passed around the bowls of berries.
“Would you tell us about your magic bracelet?” Buna asked, changing the subject.
“I don’t know very much about it myself.”
“Where did you get it?”
“It comes with the ship.”
“Is your whole ship magic?”
Ilika thought about her question for a moment. “What is magic but something you don’t understand yet? To me, making a fire with a knife is magic . . .”
Miko
grinned.
“. . . and finding food in the wild.”
Several of the girls snickered.
“To me,” he continued, “it will be magic when Mati rides her donkey tomorrow, because it’s something I’ve never done, and don’t know how.”
Mati smiled, but also wore a slight frown.
“Does your bracelet do other things?” Buna asked.
“Yes, but I can’t tell you about them . . . unless it becomes necessary.”
Midnight was at hand when they finally let the fire die down and crept into the ruined cottage to make their beds. Buna gladly accepted Kibi’s invitation to sleep near her. When they were all settled, they discovered they could look up at the stars through the missing part of the roof.
“What are stars, Ilika?” Rini asked.
“Everyone knows what stars are!” Toli blurted out. “Even slaves know that!”
“Aren’t they holes in the sky?” Neti asked, repeating what she had heard all her life.
“Of course!” Toli answered with complete certainty.
Ilika remained silent.
“Are you still awake, Ilika?” Kibi asked softly.
“Yes. I’m just wondering if this is a good time for astronomy.”
“Don’t you mean astrology?” Sata inquired.
“No. The two are different, even though they’re both about the stars. I think it’s too big a subject for tonight. I promise to do it next time we can look up at the stars.”
“Thanks,”
Rini
said.
“They’re holes in the sky. Everyone knows that,” Toli asserted before finally drifting off to sleep.
Deep Learning Notes
What life circumstances would have motivated Kibi, Neti, and others to learn about wild foods?
Edible salt, sodium chloride, has been rare and expensive in most places throughout human history. Most mammals crave it, and are constantly looking for it in the foods they eat, or in mineral deposits. Many kinds of salt are not edible, and will make us sick, such as hydrated magnesium sulfate, also called Epsom salts. Sea water is a mixture of many salts, and so is not a usable source of either water or sodium chloride.
How could the students have started a fire using Ilika’s knife?
What did Ilika learn about his students when he saw that they all still had a great gold piece, and his tube of extra gold was untouched?
What are the naming rules in that culture that Ilika is worried about when Mati chooses “Tera” for her donkey’s name? Are there any naming rules like that in our culture?
Some people claim that horses like having bits in their mouths because they work them with their tongues like we chew gum. Could this be an example of the Point of View Fallacy, in which we assume the mental state of another creature based on outward behavior, without any real way to know?
In Ilika’s first chemistry lesson, he presents a simple but useful model of subatomic structure, with only protons in the nucleus and electrons orbiting.
Any model of something that cannot be directly seen or measured, even the most detailed model we might use today, will always be simpler than the
underlying reality.
“Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.”
-- Arthur C. Clarke
A common belief in Europe before about 1700 was that the sky was a shell and that stars were holes in the shell that allowed a tiny bit of the glory of Heaven to shine through.