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The Forest of a Thousand Eyes

A Time to Sow, a Time to Hide from Poison-Breathing Deer…

In The Forest of a Thousand Eyes, the little community of Greyman’s Gate hides out in their tiny section of the crumbling Wall, besieged on all sides by the rapacious, treacherous, perilous Forest. One of their greatest treasures is the Year Wheel, on which the seasons are laid out, in pictures since none of them can read…

I have a soft spot for calendars of the past, because they show different ways people have thought about time and the passing year. Also, lots of them are beautiful.

Calendar from Catalan atlas, 1375

Most people have heard of the Mayan calendar, but their complicated system actually used three calendars. The sacred Tzolk’in calendar had 260 days in a year, the Haab had 365 and the Long Count measured time over thousands of years.

Mayan Haab calendar, from lithography attributed to Jean Charlot

When the ‘Long Count’ calendar was due to finish its cycle in 2012, some people panicked. Clearly the world was about to end! (It didn’t.)

In medieval times most people worked on the land, so some calendars had pictures of the farmwork that would have kept everyone busy at different times of year.

Norwegian folding calendar, about 1400

(In these illustrations it looks a bit like May was devoted to naked broccoli-gathering, and August to cleaning radiators with a sickle. Sadly, I suspect that wasn’t what the artist was aiming for.)

Another strange calendar was created after the French revolution. The government wanted a totally new calendar for the bold new era. The months would be renamed, and would be exactly thirty days long, broken into ten-day ‘weeks’! And each day would be named after a different plant, animal or farm tool! The 30th September was now Parsnip day! 28th July was Watering Can day!

Vendemiaire, the ‘Grape Harvest’ month

So what sort of calendar would the folks of Greyman’s Gate have? They aren’t measuring time in millennia, they’re not farmers and they’re not proclaiming a brand new era. For them, the seasons are the changing, vicious moods of the Forest. They need the Year Wheel to remind them which threats are coming next…