by Manda Scott
‘It wasn’t all as bad as Rosita Chancellor. Bits of it were grounded in reality.’ Ursula swirled the ice in her glass. ‘I chaired a panel this morning that had two anthropologists and an archaeologist in the speaking team. Admittedly it was hijacked for ten minutes by the rogue element who wanted to discuss whether Cedric Owen’s lost skull was in fact the Blue Skull of Albion when everybody knows – or doesn’t – that the Albion skull was buried with Arthur at Avalon and will return when he does, riding at the head of the wild hunt to save England from ruin. Apart from that it was all well within the boundaries of accepted science.’
‘What were you supposed to be debating?’ Stella asked.
‘The interconnectedness of crystal skull legends across the globe and their relevance to the 2012 end date.’
Stella laughed. ‘This is anthropology?’
‘I believe so,’ Ursula said. ‘There are too many skull legends around the world for there not to be a kernel of truth and all of them point to 2012 as the end date, not just the Maya. All through the Americas, the indigenous tribes are gearing up for something big that will happen four to five years from now. The Hopi have been recalling their people for the past three years, exactly to meet this date. There are perfectly serious academic journals who will publish studies on that.’
She picked at a tooth with her thumbnail. ‘It’s harder to get them to take notice of what’s happening in our own society but I’ve given my life to understanding the things that Cedric Owen did and the blue crystal skull drove him, therefore it drives me. If you’re looking for a reason for why I am what I am, Owen’s blue skull is the answer.’
‘Even down to drinking reindeer urine?’ Stella asked.
Ursula Walker stared into her lemonade a moment, then leaned over and reached behind Kit to where a bookcase lined the wall. She selected a slim notebook, from which she pulled, in turn, a photograph printed to full A4. She slid it on to the table, covering it with her hands.
‘I went to Lapland to ask a question. The people there live with different priorities from ours and there are certain rituals that must be observed before one may even ask that kind of question, and the ceremonies I described in my paper were necessary for me to understand the answer. I’m a scientist. It is sometimes difficult for me to believe that which I have been told is impossible. The various properties, for instance, of this—’
She took her hands away from the photograph and slid it across the table to Stella.
Ursula Walker was in the picture, sitting in the background half hidden by the draped reindeer hides, with the star-specked sky over her left shoulder, but she was not the focus of the image, nor the point where Stella’s eye fell.
The only thing that mattered, at first look and for a long time afterwards, was the flawless white crystal skull-stone held between the hands of a man so old that his face was cracked deep as oak bark and as brown. He wore reindeer skins and a headdress of flattened, velvet-covered antlers. His nose was a ship’s prow cleaving the planes of his face. His eyes were cataract-white, exactly the same as the stone he held, and he looked straight at the lens, and through it, to Stella.
The stone shed white light from its eyes. It looked past Stella, to the pack on the floor at her feet which she had not mentioned to Ursula Walker, now or at any time previously.
Ursula said, ‘This is the white spirit-stone of the Sami. I was not allowed to hold it. I was instructed, however, to bring back this one picture, and to show it to the new keeper of the blue heart-stone, that she might recognize the face of the white stone-keeper should they ever meet. His name is Ki’kaame. He is one of the most powerful people it has ever been my privilege to know. I saw him heal a child with the beams of light from the eyes of his skull-stone. Have you ever tried anything similar with yours?’
There was a long silence. Stella looked down into her glass. The lemonade smelled vaguely of cat’s urine, but tasted clear and bright. White petals of elderflowers floated on the top, the same colour as the skull-stone in the picture. When she looked up, the beams of its eyes were on her. Her own stone lay mute in the bag at her feet. It was vividly alert now, sharpening her mind so that sounds became more dense and colours more saturated.
‘How did you know?’ she asked.
Ursula shrugged. ‘A lucky guess?’ She ticked the evidence off on her fingers. ‘You’re from Bede’s. You’re married to Kit O’Connor who’s one of the brighter stars in the college firmament and he’s been sniffing around the origins of the heart-stone since he first knew it existed. You ring out of the blue telling me you’ve found some Mayan glyphs in the ledgers. And when I rang Tony Bookless last night to find out who you were – he was most flattering, by the way; you have an admirer there – he asked me to do whatever I could to make sure you broke the item that had recently come into your possession. Meredith guessed first, if that makes it any easier. He has a particularly agile mind.’
She sat back and lifted her glass, eyeing Stella over the top of it. ‘Were you going to tell me?’
Stella leaned back in her chair and let out the breath she had been holding. Looking up, she counted the beams in the ceiling twice over. There were nine on each side of the central ridge.
Carefully, she said, ‘Someone has tried to kill Kit at least once. They – or someone else – wrecked his room yesterday and took his computer. I have no reason to believe we’d have been left alive if we’d been in there. As far as I can tell, everyone who has ever seen Cedric Owen’s blue heart-stone has wanted either to possess it or to destroy it. It seems sensible, therefore, not to rush into showing it around. And it has my face. I can’t tell you how much that scares me.’
She thought Ursula might ask how she knew. Instead, she said, ‘Good. Then you truly are the skull-keeper. In which case the rest of us have a duty to keep you safe long enough to do what is needed.’
‘Which is what, exactly?’
Ursula clunked the ice in her glass. ‘According to the Sami, you have to place your stone on the heart of the earth at the moment of sunrise on the Day of Awakening, at which point it will join with the other twelve stones which will have been set in place by their own keepers. The full array, once linked, will bring to life the dragon of the winter snows, freeing it to fight the source of all evil and thereby heal the woes of mankind and the earth.’
‘The dragon of the winter snows?’ Stella laughed harshly. ‘Is that “within the boundaries of accepted science”?’
Ursula ran her tongue over her teeth. It was hard to tell if she was angry, offended or amused.
‘You could call it the Ouroboros, or Quetzalcoatl, or the feathered serpent, or the rainbow serpent, or the Norse dragon Jörmungandr, or Arthur’s dragon of Albion, or the fire-dragon of China, or the water-dragon of the Hindu that circles the elephants that hold the world on their backs. And yes, the comparative cultural studies of this are written in detail in a dozen peer-reviewed journals. For the Sami, it is part of an oral legend that has remained intact for four hundred and eighty-seven generations. At the start of the ceremony, Ki’kaame invoked each of the spirit-skull’s former holders by name, down the full lineage since their first making. Unless you’ve been there, you can’t begin to understand the power of that.’
‘I’m sorry.’ Stella closed her eyes and hooked her two thumbs on the upper ridges of her eye sockets. A wasp whined in through the window and came to rest on the rim of the lemonade pitcher. She opened her eyes and watched it balance on a thin lip of sugared glass.
Distantly, she said, ‘There was a poem in the Owen ledgers that led us to the stone. Read right, it’s a set of instructions. It tells us to find “the time and place appointed”, exactly the same as Ki’kaame’s legend. It just doesn’t tell us where to go or when.’
‘Has the skull not told you?’
‘I wouldn’t be here if it had.’ Stella turned to stare out of the window. The festival had packed itself away faster than she would have thought possible. Outside, the fields were almost quiet. She
lifted her bag from the floor.
The skull was almost silent as Stella set it on the table next to the picture of the white stone. Ursula Walker was not afraid of it; nor, it seemed, did she lust for it. She folded her arms on the table and laid her chin on them and, for a long time, faced the skull on its own level. She neither spoke nor moved and the skull did not sing, but there was a communication that Stella could only guess at.
Some time later, Ursula sat back. ‘There’s a test that Ki’kaame showed me. Could we try it?’
‘What are we testing?’
‘Your connection to the stone.’
Ursula was already up and moving. She unhooked a small mirror from the wall and placed it on the ground in a patch of sunlight from one of the oak-framed windows that overlooked the back paddocks. Lifting a box of matches from near the stove, she slid it underneath, angling the mirror so that a shaft of light speared straight upwards.
Satisfied, she stood back against the wall. ‘If you can bring your heart-stone and stand here, so that it’s over the mirror, and let the sun shine up through the occiput – that’s the base of the skull, where the neck would join on, like that … thank you, yes, just a little bit left. There …’
Stella stood in the middle of the floor with the skull-stone held over the patch of light. Nothing happened, except that she felt desperate and foolish at once, as if she were failing an exam she had not wanted to sit.
‘Ursula, I—’
‘Step a little further to the left, can you?’
A hand pushed her shoulder, moving her a fraction. ‘Ursula, this isn’t— Oh!’
Stella had no words for the pulse of life that surged up between her hands and became, a moment later, two beams of soft blue light that shone from the skull’s eyes.
In the blue place of her mind which had become the heart-stone’s was an open doorway, or a hand extended; an invitation that she could neither read nor answer.
She hated being tested. She hated it particularly when she did not know either what was needed or how to achieve it. She closed her eyes, reaching for the open gateway, stretching for the song of the stone as she had done all day, but with more concentration.
Perversely, it grew harder to hear, lost beneath the rising whine of the wasp, which was drowning in the lemonade. Without opening her eyes, Stella could see it, caught deep in the pitcher, rocking on an ice cube, with its right wing trailing in the sticky water beneath. She might have wished it dead, simply to shut it up, but the part of her that was wedded to the stone would not allow that and so she wished it merely out of the water and silent, the better to hear the stone’s song.
The wasp became silent. The stone fell silent with it. Stella opened her eyes.
‘I’m sorry. I can’t feel any kind of—’
‘Stella, look at the wasp.’
The wasp was not caught in the pitcher as she had thought, but sat preening on the edge. The light of the blue heart-stone softened the yellow bands of its thorax to a quiet summer green.
‘I thought it was drowning.’
‘It was,’ said Kit.
He was only just awake; she saw it in the half-dream of his eyes. The division within him had not gone; now that she had seen it, she could not un-see it. She had no idea what to do or say.
In the quiet that fell between them, Ursula Walker said, ‘I saw a sick child healed with Ki’kaame’s white spirit-stone.’
Ursula did not look up at Kit as she spoke. Slowly, Stella did. The heart-stone sang its almost-silent song. She turned the soft blue light towards him.
‘Stella, don’t. Please.’
She stopped. The blue light hovered near him, casting strange shadows on the table. Kit was white, and drawn, with new shadows beneath his cheekbones. Even in hospital, he had not looked so ill. She wanted him well again, and the stone wanted it with her; it reached for the shadows in his being as if they were strands of broken thread, to be woven whole. She closed her eyes, to keep the yearning from tearing her apart.
Again, Kit said, ‘Please.’
Stella felt his resistance as a glass wall; thick and unmoving, but so easy to break. She drew breath to imagine breaking it.
From another continent, Ursula said, ‘It may not help, but I don’t think it can do any harm.’
‘That’s not the point,’ Kit said thickly. ‘I don’t want to be able to walk again because Stell made it happen. We couldn’t live the rest of our lives like that. I’d owe her too much. Stella? Are you listening? Stop!’
‘I’ve stopped.’ She had to say it again, to be sure he could hear it. ‘I have stopped.’
The glass barrier was gone, and all sense of the shadows within him. She was not clear if the stone had withdrawn, or she had made it leave, or Kit had sent them both away.
Her hands burned as if she held ice in one and live coals in the other. She stepped away from the shaft of mirrored light. Cut from its source, the stone fell brutally silent. She was shaking all over. Her chest ached as an open hollow, as if she had been weeping for too long and only lately stopped.
There was a cool stone wall at her back. She slid down it until her knees were level with her chin, cradling the blue stone inside, against the soft parts of her belly, as if it were a child.
Through painful, scintillating sunlight, she looked up at Kit. ‘I wouldn’t have done anything if you didn’t want it.’
‘But you would have done it.’
‘It’s not me, it’s the stone. I didn’t do anything except hold it over the light. Anyone could have done that.’
‘That doesn’t make it better, Stell.’
‘Oh, for God’s sake.’ She put her head in her hands, to block out the day and the light and the wounded accusation on his face. ‘It’s a stone. A piece of rock. If it helps you walk again, would it matter that much?’ When he said nothing, she made herself look up at him again. ‘Would it have been so bad to be free of this?’
He was a child, trapped in a mess of social niceties, in the company of strangers. Pointedly, he looked to Ursula and back. ‘Can we drop this?’
Ursula said, ‘You don’t have to on my account.’
‘No, but probably best if we do.’ Something dense and cold had taken up residence in Stella’s abdomen. ‘Can we assume that I passed your test?’
‘Unquestionably.’
‘Right. I don’t know how much Kit heard, but in essence we are no further forward than we were, except to confirm that this is Cedric Owen’s stone, one of thirteen that must be taken to the place appointed, at dawn on the day appointed, and we know neither.’
The churning in her guts was less, if not her heart. She was beginning to think more clearly. ‘Are the rest held by people as clueless as us, or will they know more of what they’re doing?’
‘I have reason to believe there’s one in Hungary and one in Egypt, both held by families who still understand what they’re for and what’s needed. I would like to think the rest are held by people who know similarly what to do. I have no idea at all how to contact them.’
‘So the Sami could tell us where to go and when?’
‘I think so,’ Ursula said. ‘The problem is how to ask them without going there. When you first rang me yesterday, I sent an email to Lapland asking for help, but I’m not holding my breath for a reply. It’s a seven-hundred-mile trek from the herding grounds to the internet café in Rovaniemi in Finland and only one of Ki’kaame’s great-grandsons has ever learned how to use a PC.’
Kit said, ‘How long would it take you to get to Finland?’ His voice was brittle, as if he was asking the question simply to be heard.
‘Too long. The stone wouldn’t risk coming out of hiding unless we were very close indeed to the Day of Awakening.’
‘And I thought we’d been so clever finding the code.’ The irony in his smile, at least, was real.
Ursula liked him. There was a different warmth in her eyes. ‘You were,’ she said. ‘If there had been no one left with a strength of heart a
nd mind to match it, it would have stayed hidden for the rest of eternity and the arc of the nine would never be lit at all. Our problem now is how to begin to find the answers when we don’t even know how long we’ve got.’
‘We have the codex we found in Cedric Owen’s ledgers,’ said Stella. ‘It’s why we came here in the first place. It must have the answers, surely.’
It was worth a lot of the past half-hour simply to see the world crash to a stop in Ursula’s face. She said, ‘I don’t understand.’
‘Here.’ Kit lifted his bag from his chair and gave it to Stella. She opened it and spread everything neatly across the floor: the original copies of the ledgers, the prose poem they had found from the shorthand in the final volume, and her attempts at recreating the Mayan glyphs in the other volumes.
She said, ‘I told you on the phone that we’d found some glyphs. They’re part of a code – you build them up from marks in the ledgers. They come out in a twelve by twelve array.’ Stella spun the opened file across the floor. ‘Can you read them?’
Ursula was already on her hands and knees, pulling the pages into a line across the flagstones, reading as she went.
‘I, friend of the … jaguar-woman … I write this … account of my life, my knowledge, my learning— That one isn’t clear, I’ll need to look it up, it goes deeper than that. I begin in … the city with the great river – that would be Paris. He was never in London – and my meeting with the … star-gazer and teller of … true futures. That has to be Nostradamus; we know they shared a lodging in Paris … My God—’
Ursula was shaking; the page fluttered in her hand. Her eyes were alight with a startling fervour. ‘Stella, this is a gold mine, the mother lode of all gold mines. Cedric Owen spent thirty-two years among the Maya of the New World. If he wrote down what they taught him, it will be more than enough. Somewhere in here will be the detail of where we have to take the stone and when. How fast can you transcribe this?’
‘Faster than I could have done now we’ve got Kit’s software.’
‘What are you waiting for?’ Ursula flushed like a schoolgirl. ‘You write, I’ll translate. If we do nothing else, we could conceivably have all thirty-two volumes done within the week.’
