"Metric?" Isabel echoed the word awkwardly, wondering how they had found themselves discussing measurements while standing in a ruined keep in the moonlight.  Of course she'd expected this to be an odd and eventful journey, but not in<em>this</em>sort of way.  She felt like an ill-prepared student left to flounder by a distracted teacher.<br/><br/>"Return... yes, they returned.  But they went searching in pairs, in the daylight, for safety's sake, where the lost men vanished in the darkness, alone.  There was no sign among the rocks except for some odd scrapes here and there.  Metal on stone, they said."  She had almost forgotten the light, though she still could not stop herself from looking at it now and then, still trying to puzzle it out.<br/><br/>Then he asked his most incomprehensible question yet, and she frankly gaped at him.  "You say you are an educated man and yet do not know the year?  Fourteen hundred and sixty, of course.  The nones of June," she added, with exaggerated patience, trying to anticipate at least one of his endless questions.