"Nostalgia Ain't What It Used To Be"

Gratillonius returns to Ys and tells his men that they are now belatedly retired with pensions and bonuses from the Roman Army but they want to continue marching with their centurion. Really they want not Heaven but Valhalla.

Gratillonius had lived in Ys for seventeen years but it is destroyed by a single storm and immediately begins to seem unreal:

"Had Ys ever been?
"Alone in the grey, Gratillonius wondered. It felt like a dream that glimmered from him as he woke."
-Poul and Karen Anderson, Dahut, Chapter XX, p. 467.

This is the last page of Volume III and there follows a nostalgic list-description:

rampart
gate
ships
tall towers above shadowy alleys
watchfires
heathrfires
temples
taverns
philosophers
fools
witchcraft
wisdom
horror
hope
songs
stories
friends
foes
Gods
the women
their daughters

In previous posts, I have tried to make these aspects of Ys seem as real as possible as they are in the texts.

Already, Gratillonius feels that he has been betrayed by Mithras but I am not sure why. Mithras, a soldier, fought for Ys and would surely expect his soldier to continue fighting for civilization. We must now read Volume IV in which Ys no longer exists. The gleaming towers seem like a dream to the handful of survivors and were already a fabulous legend to those who had never seen the city. Recently in the Latin class we read Aeneas' lament for Troy.

Some of my former teaching colleagues continue to play, and usually lose, amateur cricket in their retirement. They bought what they thought would probably be their last scoring book but it wasn't! This is their Valhalla: fixtures every season followed by food and drink back at the Punch Bowl.