Building The Future

Tireless, Gratillonius, still styled "King of Ys," goes directly from construction work on a furnace to a meeting of fisher village headmen that will organize joint undertakings and patrols against pirates but pauses to house several strong, skilled men who have come to join his colony. The future grows visibly.

Fabulous geography gives way to contemporary geography. Ys is gone. From the top of Mons Ferrruginus/Mont Frugy, Gratillonius looks down to the River Odet and the cultivated fields beyond. He leads the building of the societies that will survive the Fall of the Roman Empire just as Poul Anderson's character, Dominic Flandry, lays the foundations for societies that will survive the Fall of the Terran Empire.

The countryside glows with promise:

"With surrounding trees cleared away, [Gratillonius] had a view down wooded hillside whose green glowed transient gold..."
-Poul and Karen Anderson, The Dog And The Wolf, Chapter XI, section 4, p. 226.