Cristo's Chronicles (Book One-The King's Challenge)
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 without the use of magic, replacing it with real conditions of the Bronze Age and fact based conjecture about the earliest scientists. Cristo, an orphan boy, has grown up in the court of King Adolphus. Lord Allard, the King's wizard, makes Cristo his assistant in a quest to perfect a water clock and use it to set up a calendar.Duke Nextor, the King's unscrupulous rival, and his wizard, Boltair are also intent on developing a calendar. They have dispatched Griogor, a peasant boy, to spy on Lord Allard's work. The two young boys join together, and the action becomes a race between the two forces to acquire the strategic advantage of a new technology. A particularly tricky feat concerns recording data in a world without counting ssytem or written symbols. Lord Allard's solution to this problem results in developing the earliest tools of timekeeping: a bead calendar for recording the readings of a water clock and a shadow clock, the precusor of a sundial.