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Set in an ancient time, featuring two competing wizards, and turning on the deeds of two brave young boys, this book provides all the adventure of a fantasy novel but pushes magic completely out of the picture, replacing it with the real conditions of the Bronze Age and fact-based conjecture about the earliest human scientists. The fictional characters, who live in a time before recorded history, ... More

Set in an ancient time, featuring two competing wizards, and turning on the deeds of two brave young boys, this book provides all the adventure of a fantasy novel but pushes magic completely out of the picture, replacing it with the real conditions of the Bronze Age and fact-based conjecture about the earliest human scientists. The fictional characters, who live in a time before recorded history, include Cristo, an orphan who has grown up in the court of King Adolphus, and Lord Allard, the king's wizard, who makes Cristo his assistant in a quest to perfect a water clock and use it to set up a calendar. All is well until they discover that Duke Nextor, the king's unscrupulous rival, and his wizard, Boltair, are also intent on inventing a calendar and have dispatched Grigor, a peasant boy, to spy on Lord Allard's work. The two young boys join forces, and the action becomes a race between two scientific teams to acquire the strategic advantage of a new technology. A particularly tricky feat concerns recording data in a world without a counting system or written symbols. Lord Allard's solution to this problem results in versions of what are usually thought to be the earliest tools of timekeeping: a bead calendar for recording the readings of a water clock and a shadow clock, the precursor to the sundial.

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