The Chronicle of the Worthy Son

The Pin Star

It had been eleven times now that the sky had begun to grow light before Chessie hid the two of them away in isolated homes else twice in caves. Eleven days had passed Able by then, working his ever-number legs through ever-longer blackness. The cloudy skies, often bringing rain and mist, had left him as rudderless as he'd been in that cell. But tonight, half a moon hung at their backs, the air clear enough that its beams scattered along the forest floor.

Chessie was wary of all the light. She never glanced back to admire their celestial companion instead hesitating every so often in her steps forward. She held up a hand for Able to stop before taking one more step and adopting her channeling posture. Able stepped to the side to peer past her shoulder. Through the fog of his own breath and between the naked branches ahead loomed a grassy clearing with stars winking above it.

Across the field, a herd of ponies were grazing or dozing. Hints of smoke rode in on a gust of wind that pulled at Able's hood. There must be a town below this hill. Chessie was likely to take her time with this. Able took a deep breath too quickly, but even in the wash of dizziness, he was too excited to sit and wait. But wait he must for time to once again become meaningful.

Finally, she decided it was safe to proceed into the field. Once the sky spread out overhead, Able left her back in search of a clear view of the North Star. There, humble little thing more identified by the brighter arrangements around it. He stopped and pulled his astrolabe from his pocket. Only four strides from their path, but enough to concern Chessie.

"What are you doing?"

"Finally figuring out where I am." He carefully aligned his instrument with the star.

"The Pin Star will tell you that?" Chessie said to his shoulder.

"Yes." Able brought the tool down and spun the rete to make the necessary calculations. ...could that be right? He lifted the astrolabe again to double-check the star's altitude, but now his hands were shaking.

"So, where are you?" she asked gently.

"I am...roughly fourteen hundred miles from home." Able took a steadying breath. "Not—not accounting for our easterly route. So...nearly three hundred miles more?"

"Oh, you've done better than that," she offered with an amused smile.

That hardly seemed possible. And yet...what had he done but follow this woman with her relentless strides through the hinterlands? She was the one who got them from shelter to shelter acquiring and carrying only what they would need throughout the night with them, while his grand contribution to their survival had been refusing to complain. She would know.

She was also quiet. Her face was stone-like and stark white, as though the cold moonlight had washed her freckles away. She was not channeling though, no, she was looking down at—at the astrolabe where Able was fidgeting with it. He shoved it back into his pocket and stared down at the grass.

"Livingkind," she began, "wears regular the trails about its burrows, taught these places by parents and grandparents. This is true even of the roamers who travel south of the winter; it's always the trail they know. They only venture from these little worlds into a wider one when they become either too hungry or too bored. I wonder at our kind...is it hunger or boredom that we have cultivated to this breadth?"

Able couldn't help but smile. "What we had was the boredom to cultivate more orders of hunger than other creatures can even imagine."

"That is so." She smiled in return then minutely jutted her chin towards him."How does it work, your little disk?"

"Ah." Able pulled the astrolabe again from his pocket so he could show her. "This is the plate, a chart of the night sky for 38.2 N degrees latitude—my home. The disk here is divided into degrees—we divide circles into degrees. With it, I can make all sorts of calculations. If I know the date, I can anticipate a star's altitude. And reverse, if I can catch a star's altitude, I can find the date and even the hour. I can make any number of calculations, even ones that aren't astronomical. Algebra in my palm. Dagobar may have given the world the printing press, the knitting frame, and the flush toilet, but they didn't invent this. Their universities adopted our mathematics." Was he boasting or pleading?