Towards the end, Sarah thinks she’s found a way to measure the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere that comes from burning fossil fuel. I didn’t let her explain, because I thought it was too technical, but now we’re here and I’m filled with regret, so let’s science together a bit. We’ll start with carbon—that’s the C in CO2. Carbon is awesome. It can make funky things at the temperatures found on Earth, like the sugar found in DNA. That’s why it’s in every living thing we’re aware of. It’s in the air. It’s everywhere. There’s also a special kind of radioactive carbon called carbon 14 but we’ll call it Steve because that’s more fun. Steve is also in the atmosphere. Plants take in some Steve during photosynthesis. That means a banana tree has some Steve in it, and so does a banana. You eat the banana and, you guessed it, there is some Steve in you. (Note that the same is true if something else eats the banana and you eat the something else.) In the end, you and every other living thing has more or less the same amount of Steve in you as there is in the air around you. Then you die. Sorry. When you die, you stop eating bananas. No new Steve comes in, and the Steve that’s already in you starts to fall apart because, you see, Steve is not like the other carbons. Steve is unstable. He decays, sloooowly. If you leave Steve alone in a room and come back in 5,730 years, half of Steve will be gone. Because we know how fast Steve decays, we can know how long you’ve been dead by measuring how much Steve is left in you. That’s carbon dating in a nutshell. What’s that got to do with fossil fuel, you say? Well, fossil fuel, petroleum for example, is still a bit of a mystery, but we know it comes from decomposed organic matter. Dead things. Very, very dead. We also know that the process takes, like, forever, way longer than it takes for Steve to disappear completely. So when you burn fossil fuel, the CO2 you throw back into the air contains no Steve at all, and over time, you reduce the Steve concentration in the atmosphere. Tadaa. That effect was discovered by Dr. Suess (that’s not funny) in the late fifties. Dr. Hans Suess was an American chemist born in Austria.
Given the current attitudes towards facts and science, trying to imagine the social consequences of rising temperatures and extreme and unpredictable weather is really scary. One only has to look at the past for clues. In the first entr’acte, set in 1608, the Eighty-Seven stumble upon a witch trial on their way back from visiting the first wind-powered sawmill in the Netherlands. The sawmill is real, of course, and that technology would help create the Dutch empire, but the interesting part is the witch trial. Like other parts of this book, it has something to do with the climate. The event takes place at the height of what is known as the Little Ice Age. It’s a period of—you guessed it—cooler temperatures. Winters in Europe and America were colder. Rivers froze. The Baltic Sea froze. Winters also lasted longer, by a few weeks, which meant shorter growing seasons, crop failures, famine, etc., etc. Bad things. Science was kind of iffy at the time, so in the absence of a plausible explanation, people looked to the supernatural for answers. Witches. Unmarried women made for easy scapegoats and were singled out for the slightest of reasons, like having a mole. Women were accused of anything from stealing the milk out of starving cows to raising storms with the Devil’s magic. In North America, the Salem trials (1692–93) are the most well known, but there were similar trials all over Europe during that period. This wasn’t the first time people were killed because of the weather. The Greek myth of Iphigenia, sacrificed by her father to quell the gods’ anger and receive favorable winds, is rooted in the customs of the time. In the north, the Vikings performed a “blót” to ensure Odin’s goodwill about the weather. Scientific ignorance paired with religious extremism leads to all kinds of craziness, including throwing people into rivers to see if they float. There is some interesting new research[15] that suggests that the Little Ice Age might have been caused in part by reforestation after the genocide of native people in the Americas. Following Christopher Columbus’s first voyage, Europeans killed about 90 percent of the indigenous population, either directly or by spreading disease. The dead stopped farming, and trees started to grow back, reducing CO2 concentrations enough to cause a global cooling.
Alas. Let’s start with the obvious. As far as I know, they don’t exist, but I’m the first to admit that there’s a whole lot I don’t know. If you believe this story, though, they would have come a little over three thousand years ago, most likely somewhere in Mesopotamia. On today’s map, that’s Iraq and Kuwait, parts of Saudi Arabia, Syria, and Turkey. I know this, of course, because I recognized Kibsu and Rādi Kibsi as words from the Akkadian language, which was spoken in the region at the time. I say they would most likely have landed in Mesopotamia, because Akkadian was also the language used for trade in much of the Near East, so, who knows?
According to the online Akkadian dictionary[16] of the Association Assyrophile de France, the word Kibsu can be interpreted in several ways: a footprint, a path, a way of life, a line of reasoning, etc. Rādi Kibsi is the one following the footprints, a tracker.
Mia, Sarah, and her mother leave Germany on September 18, 1932, aboard the SS Milwaukee of the Hamburg-Amerika Linie. They cover their tracks as best they can, but if you look at the actual passenger manifest from that day, you will find a Sarah Freed.[17]
In AD 921, a thousand years earlier, the Sixty-Five is part of a delegation sent by the Abbasid caliph to Volga Bulgaria. She travels up the Volga River with a fellow named Ahmad Ibn Fadlan—we talked about him before—who serves as secretary to the ambassador. I tried to set events happening at different times in similar places, and you’ll see the Volga in a few places throughout the book. For example, Kapustin Yar, where they built the launchpad for the first Soviet missile, the R-1, is near the river.
Ahmad Ibn Fadlan was a real person. He went up the Volga to meet the new king of Volga Bulgaria, and along the way he met himself some Vikings. The cool part is he took some notes. I put a little quote from his journal in the scene, but a lot of it is inspired by what he wrote. The Kibsu ends up marrying Igor of Kiev, son of Oleg of Novgorod. The Varangians, a.k.a. Vikings, ruled over a massive part of Europe and Asia at the time. The Kievan Rus’ empire, as it was called, was based in Kiev, and we have Igor’s dad to thank for that. Olga of Kiev, Igor’s wife, was also a real person, and she was not someone you wanted to mess with. We don’t know much about her, but the story about burying people alive, killing thousands, and burning a town with pigeons to avenge her husband is a real thing.
We go back another eighteen hundred years to meet the Seven in the third entr’acte. She—her name is Varkida—joins a group of horse-riding warriors before being banished and starting her own all-woman tribe, which you might have recognized as the legendary Amazons. Varkida is the name of an Amazon (BAPKIΔA) appearing on a sixth-century red-figure amphora (it means “princess,” likely from Proto-Indo-European *wel-, as in English “weal[th]”).[18] Legend aside, there is significant evidence that the Amazons were actually Scythian warriors (sometimes called Saka). The Scythians were badass. They were nomadic tribespeople, incredible horse riders, and absolutely deadly with a bow. And yes, some of them were women. Just google “Scythians”; the connection to the Amazons is cool enough that thousands of people have written about it.
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