Ultima

Ultima

By Stephen Baxter

The Academy of Saint Jonbar  had been established on the edge of Eboraki, away from the crowded ancient core of the city, in what Penny might have called an outer suburb. The refectory where they would eat, though attached to the Academy, was a short walk out of the campus and toward town.

The main schoolhouse was one of a cluster of such buildings, all brand new roundhouses, which included a gymnasium, a library, an arts center, a small clinic, a workshop for pottery, metalwork and other crafts, and a Christian chapel. The building were arranged in neat rows, like the city itself aligned not north-south but on a northeast to southwest axis, the direction of the solstice sunrise and sunset, following Brikanti tradition. There was a grassy playing field, and a kind of parade ground where some of the students, cadets of the armed forces of the Brikanti, could practice marching, and wage mock battles with swords and even blank-loaded firearms. But all this was set in an oak grove, one of a number studded around the city, the three a symbol of ancient druidh wisdom.

Penny and Marie had together designed this complex, with device from Ari and other locals, and all paid for  by money Ari had managed to extract from Navy contingency funds – the military-college aspect had been part of the price they'd had to pay for that. To Penny, even now, it looked like a museum piece, like a reconstruction of some Iron Age village rather than a brand-new, living, breathing facility for young people.

Ultima. Picture by Elena.

Of course those few students who went on to become full druidh wouldn't be so young when they finished. Ari, for instance, had gone through a few years of general education, including history, geography and philosophy, followed by twenty years of specialist study in law, politics, and mathematics and astronomy. Nowadays this was a literate culture, but Ari had told Penny that the old preliteracy tradition of memory training, the recall of long passages, was still used to develop the mind. Mathematics was particularly strong here. Penny herself had supervised classes of young children learning to reproduce the outlines of mistletoe seeds using the arcs of circles, carefully drawn with compasses and pens. It was easy to see, given such beginnings, how the Brikanti grew up to be such fine astronomers and interstellar navigators: from the geometry of a mistletoe seed to the trajectory of a starship.

The principal town of Eboraki was evidently a more ancient community that the Roman-planted towns in Gaul and Germania, and the older traditions of Celtic architecture and town planning lingered on, not obliterated by later Roman developments as in Penny's timeline. A grid pattern of roads of gravel and crushed rock separated houses of wattle and daub with thatched roofs, all surrounded by a monumental wall,outside which lay cemeteries and funeral pyres. The higher ground in the center of the city – in Penny's world dominated by a cathedral that had stood on the site of a demolished principia, headquarters of a Roman legion – did bear the remains of a two-thousand-year-old fort, but here it had been a Brikanti-built bastion, a relic of the days when continental invasions had been feared and experienced. This Britain, for better or worse, had never been severed from its own past by a Roman sword.