Year 1120 is one of the fixed years of Antiterra around which the company’s journey through time is ordered: the era of Swann’s mother, the year of Kronamon’s sacrifice, and a time when allies will be needed in the desert.
Significance
It carries three functions:
- Genealogical era: «Mil ciento veinte es la época de tu madre» (“Eleven twenty is your mother’s era”), said to Swann of Ariadna, his mother, of the Ärsvan Templar line.
- Sacrificial scene: Kronamon is “taken and handed over by his father in the year 1120”, and executed in it.
- Strategic need: in 1120 allies will be needed in the desert, “something they did not have before”.
Context
In Antiterra years usually arrive carried by objects: a letter dating to 1054 an ancestor’s departure from Cairo, documentation the companions suspect was “planted”, a Back to the Future-style almanac dated “a decade” ahead, a clock and flare opening a “ping point” in 1389. The year 1120 has no such support: it comes through lineage and blood.
The fixed years are 1054 (Jerusalem to Spain via Cairo, with the Cup of the Christians entrusted by al-Mustansir, Caliph of Egypt, to “a small group” led by an ancestor), 1055 (Constantinople, base of operations for a week, where one coexists “in places at the same time”), 1089 (the great tournament of the million rescued souls), 1120, 1300 (a preventive invasion made “subtly, respecting humanity”), 1389 (Kosovo), 1889, 1900–1901, 1913 and 1914. The medieval block is that of lineages, relics and wars; the modern one, of uchronic Paris and Sarajevo, is where the travelers come from (their year of origin is 1901). 1055 is the hinge from which they are sent backward and forward. Distances are measured in “light-years”, for both space and time.
From 1389 a forbid blocks later travel, justified by the maxim “no law is retroactive”; 1055 and 1120, earlier than it, remain open.
Conflicting accounts
- 1900 vs. 1389: one version says they die “in a great battle in the year 1900”; the scene, however, is Kosovo 1389.
- 901 vs. 1055: the company reckoned “if he said a thousand years, we’d be around 901”; the setting was given as “Constantinople, around the year 1000”, and the records date it 1055.
- 1930: appears once, among mentions of 1913, 1901 and 1830; whether it is a travel year or a slip is undetermined.
Open questions
- What physically happens in 1120, and in which desert the allies are sought, is not recorded.
- Who executes Kronamon, and who his father is, is not recorded.
- Who issues the 1389 forbid, and against whom the 1300 invasion is made, is unknown.
- Who planted the documentation and the forward-dated almanac, and why, is unknown.
- Whether Antiterra has its own era count or uses the terrestrial calendar is not established.