The pale man drifts south to the Antilles

The Vinland window is open for a short generation. Thorfinn the Elder — the historical Thorfinn Karlsefni of Thorfinns Saga Karlsefnis — sails home before the ice closes. His son does not.

The boy is twelve or fifteen or twenty — the canon will not settle the age, because the canon will not settle the question of whether he was the same person at twelve and at fifteen and at twenty. He drifts south with the warming current along the eastern continent. He passes the Florida Keys without landing. He is taken at an islet the Taíno call Iya-iya — the place of crossing — by a behique who has been waiting for him.

The behique has not been waiting for him in particular. The behique has been waiting for what a stranger who arrives at Iya-iya in this season of this year would represent. The behique has been told, by his own teacher, who was told by his teacher, who learned it from a Maya astronomer who passed through Cohoba-8 four generations earlier, that a person would come from the north with the kind of language that does not need translating, and that the person would carry a warning the islands had a measurable window of years to encode before they would lose the chance.

The pale man speaks. The behique listens. The conversation lasts four nights. The conversation is the founding document of the Codec.

What Thorfinn warns about, in the language that does not need translating, is the second arrival. He has seen it on his own coast. He knows it will come to these islands. He knows when, within a generation. He knows that what it brings is not what it claims to bring. He knows that the islands’ record-keeping will be erased by people who arrive with their own record-keeping and the wrong claim about whose was first.

He cannot — even with the language that does not need translating — give the behique a precise date. He can give a sky pattern. The sky pattern is the Pleiades heliacal rising offset by the precession constant; it will, when the behique’s great-grandchildren have worked it through, give them a date that is about eight years too early but is the closest astronomical anchor any indigenous record in the hemisphere will produce.

The wrong date is the keystone.

What the pale man does not warn the behique about — because he does not know it himself in 1000 AD, and would not learn it for many centuries more — is that he will live to see all of it. He will not age. He will not die. He will sit, as a teacher to the behiques’ apprentices, in the cohoba ceremonies of the cohoba-8 generations. He will be at Salt River on 14 November 1493 when the Kalinago release their arrows at the count of the tall stranger’s seventh pace. He will be at Port Royal on the morning of 7 June 1692 when the Brethren captain drowns the fragment. He will be in the audience for every founding moment in the line’s five hundred years of resistance.

He will be alive in October 2026 when a USVI epigrapher named Iris Lettsome reads the Annaberg windmill wrong, and is right.

He is the timeline glue.

He is the line’s deepest mystery.

He has been here since before any of them were here.