The Traveller

Episodes

• The Jingkang Incident — the winter two emperors were led north in chains — You are a painter in the most beautiful city that has ever existed, finishing a finch's eye for an emperor who paints better than you do — and by the time the ice melts you will be roped into a column marching north, and the city, and the emperor, and the whole shining world of it, will be gone.
• The Dancing Plague — the city that could not feed its people — Two harvests fail, the price of bread goes through the roof, and the countryside walks to the gates of a city that has already decided in writing that it owes strangers nothing. Then a woman starts dancing and cannot stop — and the council does the responsible thing. It asks the experts.
• Bolívar — the man who freed a continent and died disillusioned — The statues make him a marble Liberator on a horse; the real man is the contradiction — the visionary who freed a continent AND the strongman who seized dictatorial powers to hold it together — and the tragedy that the union he bled for came apart in his own hands.
• The An Lushan Rebellion — the revolt that turned the Tang golden age to ash — Everyone pictures Tang China as porcelain serenity. In 755 it was the richest, most cosmopolitan, most heavily-armed state on earth, and its capital was the largest city in the world — and then the emperor's favourite general, an enormous charming Sogdian outsider the court had adopted as a son, turned three armies on the throne. We do not watch from the palace. We live it as a lamp-boy, a frontier trooper, a guardsman at the post-station where an emperor gives up the woman he loves to men who have not eaten, a woman inside a city that is eating itself — and, three times across thirteen years, as Du Fu, a failed examinee who happened to be the greatest poet in the language and who wrote it all down from the refugee roads while it was happening.
• The First Emperor — the birth of China and the price of it — One man ends four centuries of war by hammering a world of kingdoms into a single machine -- one script, one law, one wall -- and the machine is made out of people. The Traveller lives the decade from underneath: the clerk copying the new code by lamplight, the conscript on the rampart, the guardsman who smells the truth under a cart of salted fish, and nine hundred men in the rain who finally do the arithmetic.
• The Sack of Baghdad — the week the House of Wisdom drowned — I have copied other men's words for forty years, and I always believed the words would outlast me. Then the boats of the enemy's scholars came for my shelves with the same carts they used for the treasure, and a man of my own faith rode with them offering to save the books if I would only hand them over — and I learned, too late, the question I had been avoiding my whole life: is a sentence kept alive by the wrong hands still saved, or already lost?
• Socrates — the life Athens ended for asking — Everyone knows the hemlock. Almost nobody has lived the seventy years underneath it — the golden age he grew up in, the plague he walked through untouched, the three campaigns he fought in the front rank, the empire he watched his city lose, and the pupils whose ruin the jury was really trying. The choice at the end only means something with the whole life beneath it.
• Ada — the note that dreamed of a thinking machine — She is claimed and dismissed by turns. The real story is the MIND — the leap from 'a calculator' to 'a general symbol-machine' that nobody else made for a hundred years, and what it cost a woman to make it.
• The People of the Horse — the empire that made Spain sue for peace — I have ridden with people that nobody on this continent could beat, and watched the one man who tried die in a gully — and learned, before the sun was up, that killing him settled nothing at all. Seven years later the greatest empire in the Americas came to them with gifts in its hands and asked, politely, for terms.
• Pompeii, AD 79 — the day the mountain took the town — The last ordinary morning in Pompeii — not the ending everyone knows, but the day.
• Sydney, 1788 — the First Fleet, a colony begun on someone's country — The First Fleet comes in past the Heads, and a colony begins on someone's country.
• Galileo, 1609–1610 — the nights the sky changed size — A better glass, one freezing night, and the sky that changed size forever.
• Zheng He, 1405 — the admiral who could have no sons — The largest fleet on earth, an admiral with no heir, and the door China burned shut.
• Boudica, AD 60–61 — the fire Rome could not put out — What Rome takes from a queen, and the fire she lights that it cannot put out.
• Granada, 1482–1492 — the last sigh of al-Andalus — The last kingdom of al-Andalus, in the ten years before the light goes out.
• Angkor, 1177 - the water city taken from the river — A city that lives by water, and the day the wrong boats come up the river.
• Haiti, 1791–1804 — the night the drums decide otherwise — The richest slave colony on earth, and the thirteen years its people decide otherwise.