The Spirit Well

by Stephen R. Lawhead

  “Arthur himself maybe? No way to tell.”

  “Bene . . . bene .. .” sighed Brother Lazarus. He put down his pack and extracted a beautifully crafted Leica. With exaggerated care he removed the lens cap and dusted the lens with a soft cloth, then fitted a flash hood. He directed Mina to train her torch on the nearest symbols, took a light reading, set the aperture, then created a human tripod by turning the camera upside down and bracing the bottom against his forehead as he knelt. He refocused the lens and triggered the shutter. There was a silky click, and the flashbulb popped, illuminating the entire chamber with brilliant white light that seared their eyes, blinding them and causing large purple dots to obscure their field of vision. “Einen Moment,” he said. Then, fitting another flashbulb, he counted off three and snapped another picture.

  Each section of the wall was duly photographed and the camera stowed before continuing on. The next chamber they visited was larger still, and it contained the animals Kit had seen. “I give you the Hall of Extinct Animals,” he announced, shining his torch onto a row of chubby horses. Below them was a grumpy-looking rhinoceros, and farther down a bison with forward-swept horns and a young one protected beneath its mother’s belly; a pair of delicate antelope leapt on the adjacent wall, together with a bear on hind legs, its claws extended.

  “Oh wow!” cried Wilhelmina, rushing to the wall.

  “Magnifico!” chimed Brother Lazarus with a clap of his hands. “Straordinario.”

  “It is extraordinary,” agreed Kit. “They were working on this one when I was here.” He shined his torch on the woolly mammoth, the body of which was now fleshed out in greater detail than when he had last seen it.

  Just then his light began to dim. “Uh oh,” he said, giving the flashlight a shake. “We’d better move along. We can always come back.”

  Kit and Mina switched off their torches to preserve the batteries, and the three hurried on. Kit led them to the main passage and from there to the outer entrance of the cave, pausing briefly a few metres from the opening. “Here we are,” he said, blinking in the relative brightness of the daylight streaming in through the ragged gap. “Out there is nature in the rough. It is strictly no frills from here on,” he told them. “Is everybody still keen to meet the Flintstones?”

  Wilhelmina translated for the priest, who nodded his head. “Sole purpose of visit,” Mina replied for both of them.

  “Right, let’s do it.” Kit stepped to the outer opening and into the light. “Stay alert and be ready to run at all times.”

  Kit went first, taking a good look around before climbing through the opening. Wilhelmina came next, followed by the priest, and all three stood on the sloping escarpment shielding their eyes from sunlight as they took in the scene before them: a verdant valley bounded by sheer cliffs of white limestone rising up on every side. The trees and shrubs were in full leaf, and the air was hazy, full of insects, and warm.

  “It was winter,” he said, raising a hand to the faded greens and ripening golds of early autumn. “Just a couple days ago it was winter.”

  “A couple of days for you,” Mina reminded him. “We obviously haven’t got the time frame calibrated for a proper match.” Seeing the disappointment on his face, she added brightly, “Still, with any luck we’re probably not too far off the mark.”

  “I hope you’re right,” he said. “In any case, we’ll soon find out.” He started down to the valley floor, sliding on the loose scree. With a last look around for lurking predators, Kit started towards the slowflowing river that was now but an oozy trickle at summer’s end. They walked along, keeping close to the wall of the gorge, picking their way over the rocks, now in bright sunlight, now in shadow.

  Occasionally Kit paused to get his bearings, recognising various landmarks and bends in the river. The sun was dropping behind the towering cliffs by the time they reached the place Kit identified as the winter camp of River City Clan. His heart beat a little faster at the sight, and he bounded up the narrow trail leading to the stony ledge where he had last seen En-Ul and the others.

  The ledge was empty now, all signs of habitation—recent or otherwise—completely scoured away. All that was left were a few dried leaves and powdery white dust.

  “They’re gone,” he said, his voice heavy.

  Brother Lazarus took a look around, then turned and said, “Sie kommen im Winter hierher, richtig? Winter wenn sie hier kommen, korrigiert?”

  “Yes,” Mina confirmed, “they only come here in winter—that is correct.” She turned to Kit. “That’s what you said, right?”

  Kit nodded. “Then they might be back at the river camp.” He thought for a moment. “That’s miles from here, and I’m afraid we’re going to lose the light. Much as I’d like to make contact right now, that can wait. I think we should press on to the Bone House. First things first.”

  “Whatever you say, captain,” replied Wilhelmina.

  Returning to the valley floor, he led them along the river to a nearby trail that climbed up the cliffside and out of the gorge. “This is the way out,” he said. “The Bone House is up on high ground in the middle of the forest just beyond the canyon rim.”

  Kit pushed a relentless pace up and out of the gorge and wasted no time making for the place where he had helped the young clansmen erect the shelter made from the skeletal remains of animals. He had no difficulty finding the place; the crevice where they had gathered the bones was still there, as was the wide circular clearing in the woods.

  But the Bone House itself was gone, and in its place was an enormous yew tree with shaggy brown bark and short needles of deepest green. The tree’s trunk was gigantic—a half dozen people or more would have been required to link hands to reach around it.

  “Well,” concluded Kit unhappily, “needless to say, this was not here before.” He shook his head. “Look at this thing.” He indicated the great spreading branches, dark in the gloaming wood. “It’s a thousand years old if it’s a day!”

  Mina and Brother Lazarus gazed at the tree and at the blue patch of sky above. The light was fading fast.

  “Dies ist der Ort, sind Sie sicher?” asked the priest.

  “He’s asking if you’re sure this is the place,” translated Mina. She started pacing off the distance around the massive yew.

  “Yes—I mean, I think so,” replied Kit. He gazed around the almost perfect circle of the clearing. “This is it. This is where the Bone House stood. But obviously we’re way off course. It looks like we’ll have to go back and start over.”

  “Maybe not,” said Mina.

  “What do you mean?”

  “Check your ley lamp, Kit.”

  He pulled the device from his pocket to see that it was shining with an intense blue light. “I knew it! The ley is here all right. That hasn’t changed.”

  Mina completed her circuit of the tree and came to stand beside Kit, ley lamp in hand. They held the two gizmos together; the blue lights combined to bathe their faces in a radiant glow.

  “Sehr gut,” murmured Brother Lazarus, taking his place beside them.

  “A very good sign,” agreed Mina. “The ley is here and it is highly active.”

  The electromagnetic force of the ley continued to build, intensifying to an extent they had never witnessed before. The indigo lights pulsed with an ever-increasing strength, and the ring of yellow lights on Wilhelmina’s ley lamp flashed and blinked with random bursts, as if tracing the violent surges of power swirling around them.

  “Ow!” cried Mina, dropping her lamp and clutching her hand.

  “What happened?” said Kit. “Wha—Yikes!” He dropped his device too. The heat had suddenly spiked to an unbearable level.

  Mina held out her hand. The palm was red where the flesh was burned. “That’s never happened before.”

  Even as she spoke, there was a faint sizzling sound. Threads of white smoke emanated from the little holes in the brass carapace of Mina’s ley lamp, followed by a soft pop like that of a cork withdrawn
from a bottle. Instantly the lamp went dark.

  A second later Kit’s lamp fizzled out too, and the air carried the distinct whiff of ozone.

  “I guess that’s that,” said Kit.

  Brother Lazarus took Mina’s hand and examined the burn.

  “We know the ley is here—no doubt about that,” said Kit, taking in the yew’s massive trunk, hard as iron and big as a house growing right in the middle of the ley. “Now all we have to do is figure out what to do about this whacking great tree.”

  On the Road Again

  Human beings are made to travel, it seems. And a lot happens on roads. Most ancient cultures revered the road as a sacred place—the Celts, for example, considered the junction where two roads crossed a holy place. Certainly, the road is a metaphor for change and transformation—originating, perhaps, in tales such as Homer’s Odyssey and expressed in modern terms in books like On the Road by Jack Kerouac.

  In Hollywood “the road” is enshrined in a genre all its own: the road movie. From the larky string of Bob Hope and Bing Crosby productions such as The Road to Rio all the way to Thelma and Louise and extending even to absurdities like Dumb & Dumber, the road movie is both a symbol and a celebration of the innate spiritual desire to change, to be transformed. As physicist Werner Heisenberg, a man who knew something about the elusive nature of reality and its effects on the human spirit, put it, “The human race seems to love nothing more than a long detour.”

  The road and its inherent detours, dangers, and disasters can be a forceful agent of change. Approaching the outskirts of Damascus in the Arab Spring of 2011, I could easily recall the journey of the man who would become known to history as Saint Paul. In the early first century, however, he was still known as Saul, and he was on his way from Jerusalem with a heart full of hate when he was struck down by a flash of light so powerful it could not be ignored; Saul fell to the ground, and God spoke. Ironically, the purpose of his journey was to destroy the men and women who claimed to belong to “The Way”— the name given then to those we now call Christians.

  Once in Damascus, Saul was led down what the gospel of Luke terms “the Street called Straight” where, blinded, humbled, and desperate to make sense of what had happened to him, the newest convert to The Way was eventually taken to the house of a man named Ananias. While strolling down that famous Straight Street myself, it became clear to me that my early familiarity with the biblical story of Paul’s dramatic journey on the road must have contributed to, if not inspired, my use of ley lines as portals between realms of existence—an impression enhanced, I expect, by my surroundings: Damascus is one of the world’s timeless cities, a place where the remnants of successive empires have each left their indelible marks—a place where a traveller could easily believe he or she was two thousand years in the past.

  The tale unfolding in the five books of the Bright Empires series has been growing in my mind for over fifteen years. In common with the characters in the tale, and by way of research to enable a more accurate atmosphere in the telling, I have walked down canyoned alleyways in London, strode between parallel ranks of sphinxes in Egypt, descended into the sunken, sacred tufa roads of Tuscany—the current name for old Etruria—and followed the straight path through the Dordogne, Syria, Arizona, Eastern Europe, and most recently, Lebanon. Placing my feet exactly where countless others have placed theirs, often over many millennia, I can easily imagine emerging at the other end of the passage a different person, in a different time.

  This is, of course, the imperative and the appeal of pilgrimage: to change over the course of a journey. As the landscape approaches and then disappears, the traveller confronts his hopes and fears, his questions and doubts . . . and then leaves them behind as he walks, it is hoped, into a place of enlightenment and welcome.

  Walking on the Camino de Santiago in Spain, the venerable pilgrim route that begins almost anywhere in Europe before finally merging on the French side of the Pyrenees to cross over into Northern Spain, I saw and experienced firsthand the power of the pilgrim path. At the beginning of the journey, many of my fellow pilgrims carried huge rucksacks stacked high and bulging with the necessities of travel, with foam cushions and sleeping bags, teddy bears, tin cups, and extra clothing, flags, and all sorts of bric-a-brac dangling from their massive backpacks.

  As the trail wound through mountains and hills, across arid plains and stretches of wilderness to Santiago de Compostela, and as the days bled into weeks, those same overstuffed packs tended to lose their bulk. Near the top of one particularly challenging mountain a day or two from journey’s end, I came upon a veritable cairn of T-shirts and waterproofs, paperback books, socks, trousers, bedrolls, and—yes—those teddy bears and tin cups. Labouring up the mountain with my fellow pilgrims, one weary foot in front of another, it was clear that the sense of adventure with which we had all started out had now turned into something else altogether. We were all on the road, el camino—but some of us were also, clearly, on The Way.

  And the road was growing difficult. Everything unnecessary had to be jettisoned. Everything that hindered, that held back, that weighed down and encumbered—it all had to go.

  Entering Santiago, I observed triumphant pilgrims walking or dragging themselves into the city with flaccid packs, a few carrying only what they had stood up in that morning: a hat, a stick, a bottle of water stuck in a pocket. Everything else had been cast aside in order to complete the journey.

  The destination was important, to be sure; the path was not an aimless wandering through the wilds of Spain, after all. Santiago had long gleamed like a city of gold in our imaginations, and that image of safety, rest, and refreshment exerted a mighty pull. But it was the journey itself, the physical act of going, that transformed the pilgrims. For if there was to be any transformation in the spiritual orientation of the pilgrim’s soul, that change would take place not on arrival as if by magic, but in the long, hard work of The Way.

  AN EXCERPT FROM

  THE PARADISE WAR

  www.thomasnelson.com/the-paradise-war.html

  I

  AN AUROCHS IN THE WORKS

  It all began with the aurochs.

  We were having breakfast in our rooms at college. Simon was presiding over the table with his accustomed critique on the world as evidenced by the morning’s paper. “Oh, splendid,” he sniffed. “It looks as if we have been invaded by a pack of free-loading foreign photographers keen on exposing their film—and who knows what else—to the exotic delights of Dear Old Blighty. Lock up your daughters, Bognor Regis! European paparazzi are loose in the land!”

  He rambled on a while, and then announced: “Hold on! Have a gawk at this!” He snapped the paper sharp and sat up straight—an uncommon posture for Simon.

  “Gawk at what?” I asked idly. This thing of his—reading the paper aloud to a running commentary of facile contempt, scorn, and sarcasm, well mixed and peppered with his own unique blend of cynicism—had long since ceased to amuse me. I had learned to grunt agreeably while eating my egg and toast. This saved having to pay attention to his tirades, eloquent though they often were.

  “Some bewildered Scotsman has found an aurochs in his patch.”

  “You don’t say.” I dipped a corner of toast triangle into the molten center of a soft-boiled egg and read an item about a disgruntled driver on the London Underground refusing to stop to let off passengers, thereby compelling a train full of frantic commuters to ride the Circle Line for over five hours. “That’s interesting.”

  “Apparently the beast wandered out of a nearby wood and collapsed in the middle of a hay field twenty miles or so east of Inverness.” Simon lowered the paper and gazed at me over the top. “Did you hear what I just said?”

  “Every word. Wandered out of the forest and fell down next to Inverness—probably from boredom,” I replied. “I know just how he felt.”

  Simon stared at me. “Don’t you realize what this means?”

  “It means that the local branch of the RSP
CA gets a phone call. Big deal.” I took a sip of coffee and returned to the sports page before me. “I wouldn’t call it news exactly.”

  “You don’t know what an aurochs is, do you?” he accused. “You haven’t a clue.”

  “A beast of some sort—you said so yourself just now,” I protested. “Really, Simon, the papers you read—” I flicked his upraised tabloid with a disdainful finger. “Look at these so-called headlines: ‘Princess Linked to Alien Sex Scheme!’ and ‘Shock Horror Weekend for Bishop with Massage Parlor Turk!’ Honestly, you only read those rags to fuel your pessimism.”

  He was not moved. “You haven’t the slightest notion what an aurochs is. Go on, Lewis, admit it.”

  I took a wild stab. “It’s a breed of pig.”

  “Nice try!” Simon tossed his head back and laughed. He had a nasty little fox-bark that he used when he wanted to deride someone’s ignorance. Simon was extremely adept at derision—a master of disdain, mockery, and ridicule in general.

  I refused to be drawn. I returned to my paper and stuffed the toast into my mouth.

  “A pig? Is that what you said?” He laughed again.

  “Okay, okay! What, pray tell, is an aurochs, Professor Rawnson?”

  Simon folded the paper in half and then in quarters. He creased it and held it before me. “An aurochs is a sort of ox.”

  “Why, think of that,” I gasped in feigned astonishment. “An ox, you say? It fell down? Oh my, what won’t they think of next?” I yawned. “Give me a break.”

  “Put like that it doesn’t sound like much,” Simon allowed. Then he added, “Only it just so happens that this particular ox is an ice-age creature which has been extinct for the last two thousand years.”

  “Extinct.” I shook my head slowly. “Where do they get this malarkey? If you ask me, the only thing that’s extinct around here is your native skepticism.”

  “It seems the last aurochs died out in Britain sometime before the Romans landed—although a few may have survived on the continent into the sixth century or so.”