In The Years After Ys, we quoted:
"Winter heaven hung featureless grey." (1, p. 250)
- and:
"A light snow fell." (4, p. 260)
- but missed some other seasonal references:
"That night he lay awake till the east whitened, and this was around midwinter." (2, p. 255)
- and the paragraph that begins "A light snow fell" ends:
"The air had turned almost warm. It was as if the year had finally begun to await spring." (p. 260)
Important human events occur in this chapter but we know about those. I have become interested in the background cyclical narrative of the turning seasons.
There are also indications of how many years are elapsing. Gratillonius reminds Nemeta that her own child:
"'...was lost, a year and a half agone.'" (1, p. 252)
- and, at the beginning of the following chapter:
"Strange it was to be again at Ys. Three years had not diminished the longing for what was lost..." (XIV, 1, p. 265)
That means twenty years since Gratillonius came to Ys.
4 comments:
Another thing to keep in mind is that people didn't mostly die of old age back then.
The commonest time to die of natural causes in the Roman period was between 0 and 5 years old. That's the basic reason the average lifespan was about 30 or less -- very high child mortality. If you made it to 20, you had a reasonable chance of living to your 50's.
And where you lived mattered too. Most cities had negative population growth -- they required a continuous influx from the countryside to maintain their numbers, much lss grow. Child mortality was particularly high in urban areas.
Ys in Poul's series is a bit exceptional, because it has extremely good sanitation and a clean water source.
Kaor, Mr. Stirling!
Very interesting, I agree. And Rome itself, despite being vastly larger than Ys, might also have been a real world exception to that general rule, at least to a degree. The City did have an unusually advanced and sophisticated water supply and sanitation systems. Including those famous public baths, open to all for a small fee.
Ad astra! Sean
Sean: the problem with that Roman Bath thing was that you were in a big tub with people who might have any one of a dozen infectious diseases!
And while the aqueducts brought water that was certainly better than dipping a bucket into the Tiber (which stank halfway to Ostia, btw) it wasn't necessarily safe.
It was much safer to drink watered wine. The alcohol in the wine killed a lot of the bacteria.
Basically, Rome was too -big- to have a good disease environment. 1,000,000 people at that level were necessarily a hive of infectious disease.
The basic problem was lack of the germ theory.
We didn't need antibiotics to get the death rate down; what was needed was a set of basic measures like not leaving excreta exposed or letting flies settle on food and using things like slow sand filters for drinking water that were informed by germ theory.
That's when -- around 1890-1910 -- infant mortality fell sharply and infectious disease stopped being the biggest single killer, though TB lingered as a major threat into the 1930's.
The Romans -could- have done those things, they just didn't have the -idea-.
Ironically, the fact that the Roman economy was so advanced -- in many ways, more advanced that the world would be until the 19th century -- was a disadvantage disease-wise.
Lots of towns, lots of bulk long-distance trade, lots of people moving around on good roads, excellent harbors... all of them shedding bacteria all the time...
Kaor, Mr. Stirling!
Well, I did try to hedge a bit with that "to a degree"! (Smiles)
But I agree with the caveats you outlined, once you pointed them out. Esp. how unsanitary those Roman baths actually were.
Unfortunately, because of the bungling of fanatical left wing Democrats, we are seeing too many cities in the US going back to people leaving their excreta exposed in the public streets!
Ad astra! Sean
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