Thank you.
Oh, the story is, well sort of about an expedition from a quasi-Byzantine, post-Roman world up to the far north in search of a bird called the Gamayun, which is a very special bird that can convey the thoughts of the dead, which as we all know live in the far north, beyond the endless birch tree forest.
On the Northern Pull, on the bird of the dead and other ex-dogmatic phenomena of the area known presently as the Sclavic Myr.
Balthasar of Gorgona (the one-armed) scribit.
It is written in sources of the late Silver Age of our illustrious Empire, long may the rule of the True Faith guide us, that it is in the North that the great cone of the earth is suspended amidst the celestial bodies. Thus, it is the North that is the divine cardinal point, as the Dogma teaches us and as the ancients before us had already surmised and told of their gods residing in a northern mountain of unknown geographical position and appearance.
Our efforts at explaining the true nature of the Northern pull remained vexed until the epoch of the Tetrarchy, not otherwise known for great science or veracity and perhaps best remembered for its culinary and ceremonial advances. It is in the reign of the seventh of the third quart of the Tetrarchs that an important discovery was made, yet due academic procedure must first be paid to the issue of dating this discovery and the reader will surely understand and show patience in the face of digression, for digression is a divine prerogative.
The counting of eras during the reign of the Four following the collapse of the Imperial House of Severi remains to this day an affair fraught with difficulty with several lineages from which eras can be constructed across four different quarts - areas of the Empire. Thus, – Theophilos of Nicaea in his seminal work On the Correct and True Counting of Eras appeals onto all University to use instead his counting system, which counts backwards from the end of the Tetrarchy, say ’24 years before the end’ would thus point to the year the discovery was made, but the omission of the name of particular Tetrarch and Quart makes it impossible for us to divine where an event occurred from date alone. While this may provide some welcome simplicity, and every scholar who has ventured into the bowels of the libraries under the Constantian Academy will appreciate simplicity, there are other issues with his method. Since many of the noble families which still grace our Empire with their presence are directly related to one of the more than 26 Tetrarchs, the somewhat negative tone of Theophilos’s system has made it unpopular with scholars whose ambitions lie outside the Academy walls, where patronage and an unbesmirched name count for more than love of truth or parsimony.
Be that as it may dear reader, let us return to the questions of the Northern Pull, discovered as it were, some time ago by a shepherd, so it is rumoured, who was at the time in the service of Julius of Pola, a librarian and archiver of no particular talent. While it is not clear what a handsome shepherd was in fact doing in the service of an ageing Julius, it is unequivocally clear that it was the shepherd who showed the librarian a trick of cork and needle. Nowadays an experiment known and taught in schools across our land, it was for its time a true revelation. The needle, stuck through a thin cork and placed in a bowl of water, persistently pointed northwards. The librarian, though by no means a man of wit or sense of history, knew it significant and invited his colleagues to observe the phenomenon.
Though some grumbled that the needle did not in fact point to the true North as defined by the local cartographers, a consensus was reached that the cartographers of that particular provincial capital were not reliable, as visitors carrying bulky maps made of interlocking slates of wood around the city getting lost and, subsequently, robbed, would no doubt affirm.
What was this force then, which pulled the needle, which holds our world under the Heavens and which sucks all light and life, all thought and action towards the unknown North? The theologians attached to the Church of Holy Wisdom were quick to conclude that it is none other than God, or at least the Holy Spirit, or at the very least some other manifestation of His, which does not contravene the amassed dogmata of our Church. On the other side were the neo-mathematicians, a relatively new school of thought, which argued in turn that the Northern pull was nothing but a given certainty, a consequence of the way our world is constructed, nothing but nature, just as leaves will fall from a tree and rivers will not flow upwards, so the light and soul (and now it seems, metal) are drawn to the North.
It occurred to none of the schools or scientists (and there were many more, with debates about the issue raging for decades after the shepherd’s death) to visit the North. It was after all a land beyond the land beyond the wall of our Empire on the Danubium, a land beyond the mountains which our guards glance towards with anxiety and fear. Though goods of some artifice do come across the northern border, they pale in comparison to those coming from the south, let alone from our fluid eastern borders, where fabrics of unimaginable sheen come from as far as Seres to be exchanged for our automata or Italic glass. No, the north was a land of darkness, a land not often travelled before, dear reader, my humble expedition, which fortunately occurred after the end of the Tetrarchy and can thus be dates securely in the 3rd year of the rule of Constantinos the Great, Unifier of Empire, Defender of Faith.
It is clear to an old man such as myself that the impetuous reader will once more urge me to begin for once the story which caused most sensation in our capital, a story known by all and which has transformed my name into a target of both derision and outright devotion. The story of the fantastic bird Kamaion, or Gamayun, or Chamaeon, as the various spellings will have it. And worry not dear reader, I will not venture into this particular vector of digression on spelling and the evolution of our spoken word. Yet.