Medieval Connections: The Temporal Witnesses, Volume 6

By Ricardo Gómez

The Temporal Witnesses Volume 6: Medieval Connections

Three cities that had never heard of each other. One morning. All of it at once.

Dr. Sarah Crow Feather has been sending students into the past for fifteen years, one artifact at a time, one place at a time. She has never sent anyone with three. These three anchors were alive in the same century and nobody who made them knew the other two existed. Sent one at a time, she tells Cuchu Ramirez and Matias Kim, they give you three mornings in three places. Sent together they give you the three at once, and what none of them could see.

Two federal agents have read the pair's presentation on pre-Columbian urban planning and want to know where every line of it came from. The Patrimony Foundation 2.0 needs a "Dark Ages" that ran everywhere at once, and the evidence against it is being deleted from the internet while Cuchu watches the page reload.

Six hours in the flow. Nobody picks where they land or when they leave.

CHICH N ITZ , YUCAT N: A working city under white plaster and red and blue and yellow paint, in the dark before dawn. Hundreds of people are checking a Venus prediction their grandmothers helped make, in groups running the same sum twice on purpose so the two answers can be set against each other. The morning star comes up where the tables said it would and nobody cheers. One group's count refuses to come right, and the man holding their tally writes both numbers down without looking up.

CAHOKIA, ILLINOIS: Ten to twenty thousand people on the Mississippi floodplain, a match for London that same year, and the city is having a bad month. Routes are stopping and nobody can say why. Runners are handed water before anybody asks them anything. A man steps out of the granary line to say that his brother walked nine days and then could not say what he had come for. At the foot of the great mound, a dozen old people go round a circle saying a list to each other, because there is nowhere else to keep it.

GREAT ZIMBABWE: Granite fitted without mortar, a walled hill above a valley of cattle and roofs, gold and ivory going down to the Indian Ocean and Chinese bowls coming back up six thousand miles. Glazing methods and star charts change hands on that summit alongside the goods. The woman who runs the floor will not name the four people alive who know which houses on the coast will still deal with her if the port closes, and that is the only reason there are still four.

Two of the women who teach them that day would tell them to do opposite things with the same knowledge. Cuchu comes home with both of them in her head and no way to get them into one sentence.

They are gone six hours. Six minutes pass in Seattle, and the Foundation uses all six of them.

Getting them home takes more than the woman holding the other end of the connection has left, and she knows the price before she pays it.

Perfect for fans of: Octavia Butler's long view of who gets remembered, N.K. Jemisin's cities that work, and anyone who has been told that nothing much happened between Rome and Columbus.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: B0FR44HS6F
• ISBN13: 9798265346391
• Release Date: September 2025
• Publisher: Independently Published
• Length: 74 Pages
• Weight: 0.22 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.2" x 6.0" x 9.0"