The Crystal Skull

by Manda Scott

  ‘Come,’ said Cedric Owen. ‘Ours is the time, the joy and the duty.’ The words were not his; they came from the night and the earth and the place beyond the scuffing shadows of the fire whence they must walk.

  In silence they followed the red-blue path into the darkness, and presently came upon a rock that reared out of the desert, vast and smooth as the hump of a whale. High on its side, punched clear out of the stone, was a rounded cleft, of a size to take a man’s head, with or without the flesh.

  Owen said, ‘We must make the whole from the sum of its parts. Your stone must join with the soul of the earth.’ The woman was already reaching up.

  Her stone slid home to its place in the root of the earth with a sound like the birth of a star, a blinding, deafening implosion that rocked Owen back on his heels and robbed him momentarily of his senses so that he did not see the second snake, that came for the black-skinned woman.

  She was dying when next he opened his eyes, but gladly so. Her smile lit the night. She waved and he fell backwards on to earth that opened to let him through into darkness.

  ‘That was the first,’ said Najakmul. ‘You faced the serpent and lived.’

  He was already in a new place by the time he realized she was speaking to him.

  Eight times in all did Cedric Owen cast his song-line along the rift that held back the Desolation. Eight times he met a skull-holder, each with a stone of a different colour, who gave it to the earth, that its song might join with the song of the blue stone, which was also the song of all that had gone before, and greater.

  Eight times did he face death in its many guises, from a scorpion at the foot of a pyramid to a charging boar in the forests of a wet, windy plain, to a rockfall in a wooded river valley so beautiful that he wept to leave it. Eight times did he see the skull-holder greet the same death he had just avoided after the stone had been given to its place in the earth.

  Thus did he fulfil the prophecy of Nostradamus, who had cast the seven colours of light in the shape of a fan across a table in a lodging house in Paris, and shown him that after them came the black of no-light and the white of all-light to make the full nine.

  He came last to the all-light. An old, old man with a hooked nose and an antlered headdress held the white skull-stone in a place of snow and ice with harsh-coated deer in the background and a young woman weaving the song-line in her throat. Death came for Owen as an avalanche, which he ran from, returning later through thigh-deep snow. The cleft that joined the skull to the earth was dug deep into the living ice and bedrock and the old man had to be lowered in on a rope and lifted out afterwards, when the white stone was set.

  The old man and the young woman left him, swept away in an avalanche they made no effort to escape.

  Alone, and untouched, Owen stood in the black night on a landscape so vast and white that the reflected starlight hurt his eyes.

  He stood on the boundary between white snow and black night and his own blue stone sang to him, spinning and holding at once the complex thread of eight colours that encircled the earth.

  Only eight.

  The shadow of Nostradamus whispered in his ear. Nine are shaped for the races of men. Remember this. You will need knowledge of it later.

  Owen looked down at the blue stone. Thinking back, it came to him that he had passed without stopping from a green forested place with high foaming cataracts on to indigo mountains where a monk with a shaved head and prayer wheels had set a deep blue stone into a carved place in an altar so old the rock was almost gone. There had been no chance between these two to go to England, whence the blue stone had come and must return.

  Over the thousand leagues of snow and ice Najakmul’s voice came to him in tatters, torn by the razor wind. ‘You must set your will to go there.’

  Aloud, he said, ‘But where? I know not the place.’

  ‘The place will call you. Send out your care for your friend, and follow the song of your heart.’

  To his shame, Owen had all but forgotten Fernandez de Aguilar. He remembered him now, lying flat on the mosaic with one arm gone and the fluid rattles in his lungs that were killing him. He smelled the smoke of the fire, suddenly more pungent, with the same peppery sweetness of earlier.

  He sneezed. Najakmul said, ‘Drink, and remember. Your friend cares for you. You have staked your life on his. Think and remember.’

  Owen sneezed again, fluidly, and watched the stars in the high firmament shudder in their tracks.

  Think.

  He said it himself this time, without Najakmul’s help. With a grinding effort, he trawled his mind and found at last something he could hold to: the image of de Aguilar sitting with his back to the mast of his ship, looking out at the dawn before Zama, offering friendship without attachment or condition.

  Perhaps you would not wish so to burden a friend?

  The light, acerbic voice reached Owen across the wastes, and the burn of the sun and the sea wind, and the flap of the sails, and the salt-sour taste of the sea on his lips and the sway of the ship underfoot.

  Even as he matched it, the ship swayed less. The wind grew warmer and did not cut him so. The mewling cries of a distant gull came closer, and were instead the tremulous call of a tawny owlet, that was from neither the tundra of the reindeer-people nor the humid jungle of Najakmul’s jaguar night.

  Owen opened his eyes, only then aware that he had closed them. He was in England; he knew it by the smell of damp turf, and the hushing breeze and the creak and sway of the beech trees in the moonlight. Most, he knew it by the heartfelt silence of the blue stone, which had come home at last.

  He did not know the place to which he had been brought. Standing stones ringed him, of harsh grey rock, the height of a man and half as much again. Their shadows made thin black streaks that fell across the earth.

  They made the forefront to a low mound of barrowed earth, grown over with grass, as wide as de Aguilar’s ship. At its end, facing Owen, was a stone-lintelled entrance, into which a tunnel bored, guarded by the four sentinel stones and a few others, shorter and squatter with carnivorous points, set about with carved runes that caught and held the moonlight. Unreadable syllables whispered softly in the night.

  The land was the same; from all directions came faint, ghosted pathways, tracking in like the spokes of a wheel to centre on the mound within the ring of standing stones. They chimed softly, dissonantly, so that Owen was caught in a web of the moon’s weaving and all of it tugged him, whether he willed it or not, to the square-edged black mouth of the mound.

  It was a grave; he could hear the sighs of the once-living that still gathered close.

  The owl called again, more harshly. Owen felt the skin on his back shrink from an unknown threat. His blue stone gave no warning as it had done before the storm, but sat in the silence of a held breath, waiting.

  Does it require your death, this stone?

  The owl called for the third time. Owen lifted his blue stone that it might better catch the moonlight at his back and send it forth to light his way.

  For the first time, the colours it sent forward were all nine of the races of men, woven together to make the shimmer on the surface of water, or of the ice on a high mountain, split and reformed, a colour that had no name, but was precious beyond imagining.

  It arced forward, as an inverted rainbow, with the red to the inner edge and a line of diamond white to the outside. Along the ghost-light of this path, Cedric Owen walked into the mouth of the grave mound, which opened to receive him, and down the length of the tunnel beyond.

  The light was swallowed by the dark. Owen stood at the blind end of the grave mound. It was larger than it had seemed from the outside. He could feel stone all about; the tunnel walls brushed the top of his head and his two shoulders. If he stretched out both arms, he could touch the lateral margins.

  There were bones on the floor. Kneeling, he felt the length of them, and the curved ends, and knew them for parts of human and horse; more than one of each. His fi
ngers brushed against something metallic: a brooch or a coin. He rubbed his thumb across it to clear the dust of the tomb, but could not see clearly what was printed thereon. He dropped it into his satchel and felt on for the socket into which the heart-stone must be seated. He felt no danger, although death was all around.

  A noise made him turn; the sound of voices, arguing. Swaying back against the tomb wall, he found an alcove and pressed himself into it. With his two hands, he covered the eyes of his heart-stone so that it might not shed light and give him away.

  In the black, his eyes made shapes that could not be there. A young woman passed him, outlandishly dressed, speaking words in a language Owen did not recognize. She reached the end of the grave mound and looked about and, in the light of her presence, he saw the socket that would take the blue skull-stone.

  Without wishing it, Owen gave a small and breathless gasp.

  She turned, and Owen gasped aloud, for between her two hands, with the care of a mother cradling her infant, she held a blue stone, exactly like his own. In the curved mirror surface of its cranium, he saw himself reflected exactly as now, but that his hair was silver. The shock of both these two things – the stone and his hair – rendered him mute.

  The girl peered at him, and frowned. He saw his grandmother in her face and was likewise recognized. He might have spoken, but that she turned and looked back behind her in alarm, and ran on to the end of the mound, and knelt, and lifted her stone towards its resting place.

  Urged by his own fears, Owen said, aloud, ‘Do not delay.’

  She turned to him, shocked. He reached out to help her as he had helped the others. Before his hands could find flesh, there fell a fog of such density that it swallowed both girl and stone. From outside, whence had come the roiling fog, came a shout, and a crack, like thunder. In the darkness was a stifled scream and the sound of a body, falling.

  Owen did not believe the girl had set her stone as was needed. Fog-blind, he felt his way forward to where she had been. By touch, he found the socket, and would have set his own blue stone into it as he had seen done eight times already, but that his skin pricked a warning.

  He turned. A draught brushed up his left side. There, in the dark where there had been a blank wall, was a wide space. In the centre, Fernandez de Aguilar lay on a mosaic, lit by a dying fire. The signature stench of lungs in putrefaction rose from him. His breath rattled. Bloody foam leaked from his nose.

  ‘Fernandez?’

  Owen knelt to take a pulse that fluttered and leaped under his fingers in a way he knew well, and had always hated.

  ‘Fernandez, no!’ He leaned in, ready to do what he could with his breath, but too late. With the closeness of a lover, he saw the moment when the soul of his friend lifted away from the body that had so lately held it.

  He rocked back on his heels. The shade of de Aguilar bowed before him. ‘Do not grieve for me, my friend. Death is not so bad a thing when it has been preceded by joy, and I have known great joy in your company.’

  ‘No! You cannot die!’ Owen was wretched, swaying and grieving as he had seen so many others do and never yet done himself, even for his grandmother.

  He still held the blue stone, and it sang for him. Scattered bones scraped at his knuckles. He swept them away and shifted round to fit his back to the wall, where the sharp stones of the mound dug into his flesh, giving him another kind of anchor.

  The boundary between life and death was a tangible thing, a fine membrane of shimmering black, that shaped the air in front of him. Holding to the blue stone, with the grinding sharpness of the rocks as a second anchor behind, Owen thrust his free hand through the barrier to the place where de Aguilar’s body lay in the worlds of death.

  There came flesh-scorching heat, as if he had just plunged his hand into a furnace. Paired with it was a bitter, aching cold that turned his ruined fingers to stubs of iron that would not bend.

  Cursing, and then screaming, Owen strained one outstretched hand forward to touch his own life to the dark place of de Aguilar’s death.

  Death came for him, faster than the serpent or the scorpion, more crushing than the rocks or the avalanche. His smoke-given gift of speed was no longer sufficient to evade it. As a fist of dark ice, it sprang up the full length of his arm, clutching for his heart—

  —and met the steadfast song of the blue heart-stone, in the core of his own soul.

  The world exploded into shards of blue and black and scarlet.

  Cedric Owen fell backward, striking his head on stone. Fire scorched him on one side, cold on the other. A small, terrified part of his mind told him that he had entered hell, and that the priests had been right and he had all eternity to regret his hubris.

  The rest of him only knew that the blue heart-stone was lying heavily on his abdomen, and that he needed urgently to be sick.

  He rolled to his knees and puked violently, retching afterwards on nothing until he thought the lining of his stomach would fall to shreds and pour out of his throat. A beaker was pressed into his hand, made of a leaf coiled into a cone and stitched with fine tree shoots. He drank the thick, bitter liquid without comment or complaint.

  Three times, he was sick. Three times, he was held and given comfort and the foul liquid to drink. At last, heaving, he sat up and opened his eyes to find which god or devil, or some monster between, was now his keeper.

  He turned his eyes towards the half-seen figure in the white shirt who sat near the fire with one arm draped across its knees. He blinked, and again, and the shape would not go away.

  ‘Welcome back,’ said Fernandez de Aguilar peacefully. ‘It would seem that, once again, I am in debt to you for my life.’

  For the second time in too few days, Cedric Owen fainted.

  22

  Southern Mayalands, New Spain, October 1556

  HE WOKE IN daylight, in that cool part of the morning when the fire was still welcome.

  He lay on grass, not on the mosaic, and there were trees overhead, full of coloured birds and soft-furred mammals that hung from the branches and gazed at him with fat, black eyes.

  He could no longer hear their breathing, nor lose himself in the spark of light from a feather. He mourned that loss as he would have mourned his hearing or his sight.

  He sat up and was sick again; a thing so routine that his body no longer fought it. This time, Najakmul held him, and gave him the black drink; he felt the press of her breasts on his back. A shiver of fear made him pull away.

  ‘Cedric Owen?’ Her hands held him loosely. He did not look at her; could not do so without remembering how she had sat through the night on the mosaic, exactly at the boundary line between Desolation and Innocence.

  Owen said, ‘I failed you.’

  She was exhausted; the deepening lines on her face told him so. She smiled stiffly, as if her muscles had forgotten how to work. ‘You did not fail.’

  ‘But I am alive, when the others all died.

  ‘You think that failure?’ She smiled her disbelief.

  He was not in the mood to be taunted. ‘I thought only of Fernandez. I did not marry the blue heart-stone to the earth; I have it here with me still.’ It was not only in his hand, it was in his heart. Something had changed, so that he no longer reached for the stone as a thing outside himself. It had become him, or he it; its song was his heartbeat, his heartbeat its song.

  ‘It was not up to you to set it, only to find where it should be. And your friend lives, therefore you did not fail. This is yours, as proof of it.’

  Najakmul pressed a coin into his hand. On closer inspection, squinting through blurry eyes, he saw rather a bronze medallion, with a dragon worked into its front face. The wings were an eagle’s, the body lithe as a jaguar; the gaping jaws were of the crocodile and the tail curled up after the manner of a serpent. The whole thing stood with the rising sun at its back and a half-moon high above. A man stood before it, in the west; a small, insignificant thing before the might of the beast.

  A leat
her thong of a hide he did not recognize made the coin something to be worn. Najakmul took it from him and hooked it over his head. Owen looked up, holding it to the sun.

  ‘Is this Kukulkan?’

  ‘It is indeed; that which will arise from the four beasts when the arc of the nine comes together. Only the keeper of the blue stone may wear such a thing, and must do so at the end times. You should keep it now, and ensure that it stays with the stone.’

  He felt his brow furrow along its length. ‘How can I—’

  ‘You think too much. Drink now, and sleep. We will talk of it later.’

  She held the leaf cone to his lips again. The loathsome black drink crept into his head and stole his mind. He slept and when he woke it was night time, and then daytime again with the sun slanting in from the west, to light a different clearing; he lay under a shelter this time, made of branches standing on end, with their leaves trailing his face. From the opening, he could see the peak of a mountain; he was on the slopes near its height.

  Najakmul was bending over him, pressing her fingers to his lips, forcing them open. He bit down on something bitter and choked. The cone she handed him had water in it. Never had he been so glad to drink.

  He sat up and was not sick.

  ‘I’m sorry.’

  He remembered saying it before, but could not remember her answer. Saying nothing, she gave him cooked meat. The smell assaulted his stomach, kindly. He ate, and felt the heat spread to his fingertips. The world ceased to move, although the true colours did not come back, nor the songs that went with them.

  He fingered the medallion at his neck. ‘Will Desolation rule the land?’

  Najakmul sat on her heels at his side. She swept the hair from his brow and let her hand dally on his forehead, skin to skin. Her eyes were warm and dark and still tired, but less so than they had been.

  She said, ‘The time of Desolation will not come upon us until the sun treads the path to the Underworld four hundred years from now.’

  ‘Then why did we set the stones into the earth? All but this?’ He fumbled at his side for the satchel. Someone had slipped his blue stone inside and fastened the buckles. ‘I did not set this one. The arc of the nine is not made. Kukulkan will not arise.’