The Tall Stones

by Moyra Caldecott

  ‘They mean a great deal and one day you will understand them all.’

  ‘I would like to understand them now if it is possible,’ she said as humbly as she could.

  ‘Ah,’ he smiled, ‘you remind me of Karne now, wanting to understand everything immediately. Have you not learned that understanding is a slow growth and comes only in stages and when you are ready?’

  ‘I know . . . but . . . there is so little time . . .’ She meant until Maal was to die but she was sorry she had said this as soon as the words left her mouth. She could not help feeling, and Karne agreed with her, that Wardyke would not rest now until he had destroyed Maal. It was endangering his own position to allow someone to escape whom he had cursed.

  Maal knew what she meant and looked thoughtful.

  ‘You are right. There is no time to waste. Come, sit with me and I will teach you things you need to know.’

  ‘About the carvings?’

  ‘The meaning of the carvings is only a small part of a greater whole, some of which you already know.’

  ‘Are the different circles the different levels of reality one can discover around one . . . gradually as one’s understanding and awareness develops?’

  Maal smiled.

  ‘You see? You do not need me to explain things to you.’

  ‘But . . .’

  But he held up his hand and she knew she had to stop talking.

  ‘As you said . . . there is not much time. Today we must try something that I would not have chosen to try till much later in your apprenticeship.’

  Kyra looked anxious. Maal noticed.

  ‘Not dangerous so much as . . . difficult,’ he said reassuringly. ‘If you do not succeed, no harm will come to you. But if you do, our work together will be that much easier.’

  She was comforted.

  ‘What must I do?’

  ‘First, sit.’

  She sat.

  ‘Now relax and go quiet within yourself as I have taught you.’

  At first she had found this very difficult to do. Her mind seemed to be continually chattering on and on, going over things repeatedly, worrying at new things, even remaking old memories with slight alterations. She had caught herself at this several times and had been quite shocked at herself. Somehow by the time she had ‘remade’ a memory in words in her head her own part in it always looked better than it had at the time of the actual happening. Maal had been trying to teach her to control her mind so that it did not run on and on like this. At first he had taught her to blot out the incessant gabble by replacing it with one image or word that was so insistently and repeatedly thought of by her there was no room for any other. Once she had mastered this, it was her task to do away with the blocking word itself and keep her mind poised and still ready for messages from her deeper self, her Real Self, which was in touch with the other levels of Reality.

  Another trick he had suggested to her to help her achieve this was to choose a word and use it as a kind of magic flower from which a thousand petals of meaning and association could be plucked.

  ‘This way,’ he said, ‘you think of the word and what it suggests to you, and then you think of the word again and what else it suggests to you. You repeat this again and again, coming back each time to the original word, until you find somehow the word is associated with everything. Everything is associated with everything else. We are parts of a whole and nothing is separate. As this conviction grows on you, you will feel yourself more and more receptive to the whole. Your own separate identity will lose its hold, your protective wall of mind wordage will be down, and influences from outside and beyond yourself will be able to penetrate.’

  It was this method she chose to use this day.

  And the word she chose was ‘stone’.

  stone . . . mountains . . . stone . . . cliffs . . . stone . . . rocks in rivers . . . rivers of water working at the rocks of stone . . . water breaking rocks of stone into sand . . . stone sand . . . stone earth . . . roots in earth sand . . . roots in stone earth . . . roots drawing nourishment from stone earth . . . water containing grains of stone . . . earth . . . crushed stone . . . nourishing plants . . . plants containing stone . . . crushed stone . . . nourishing her and animals . . . stone . . . animals with crushed stone from the plants nourishing her . . . she, part stone . . . part earth . . . part universe . . .

  She could feel her identity growing and growing until it encompassed everything . . . she was part of the universe and the universe was part of her . . . and as she became aware of this she also became aware that she was no longer Kyra in Maal’s house, she was Maal but Maal was a younger man and he was standing in the thick dust of a parched country.

  She looked at her feet and they were Maal’s feet clad in unfamiliar sandals made of hide thongs. She noticed they were not covered in dust although they should have been. It puzzled her that they were not covered in dust. It puzzled her that she should think that they should be.

  Behind her stretched a steep road curving down a rocky hill into a dry valley. The sun was blazing on everything, brighter than she had ever known it, bleaching the colour out of the landscape. Beside her was a gigantic wall built of huge stones placed one upon the other, one beside the other, each one a slightly different shape and size and yet all fitted neatly and intricately together with great skill so that there were no spaces at all between them.

  Before her was a gateway so large one would think it was made for giants and above it two great beasts facing each other were carved out of solid rock. She gasped, straining to lean far enough back to see the height of it all. But even as she was doing this she could feel herself impelled forward to enter the gate. Guards were posted, wearing strange clothes and carrying tall and deadly looking spears, but they seemed not to notice her. She found herself walking past them and facing a kind of citadel or palace built of stone.

  The road from the valley continued through the gate and spiralled up the hill, the huge walls curving with the curve of the road. She walked on unnoticed by the people who were going about their daily business. To the right and to the left she saw more of the pale dust-coloured stone. She could not believe men could do such wonderful things with stone and wondered that her own people did not build temples and palaces in this way.

  The hill was steep but the high walls gave shade. She walked where she fancied, exploring doorways and courtyards, confident that she could not be seen. As she climbed higher the view of the distant landscape she occasionally caught was breathtaking. She could see a line of ocean so deep in the colour blue that if it had not sparkled so, she would have thought it was a field of flowers. The palace-citadel was built on a high and isolated hill. To the left there were rocky mountains, the colour of ripe wheat, devoid of grass or heather. But in every other direction for a long way there was nothing but arid plains, until on the far horizon a line of hills ran down to meet the unbelievable blue of the sea.

  ‘Greetings,’ a voice said suddenly beside her – or was it in her own head the word formed?

  She spun round. She was in a vast courtyard paved with cool stone dazzling white and so smooth that a moment before she had stooped down to stroke it but strangely had felt no sensation in her hand. She saw now that she was not alone. An old man clad in a robe of a deep violet colour was looking directly at her.

  ‘Greetings,’ she said tentatively, for the first time in this strange place at a loss to know what to do next.

  The man smiled and approached.

  ‘You have come a long way and you are welcome,’ he said kindly.

  ‘Thank you,’ she said, but it was Maal’s voice she heard saying it. She still could not make out if they were speaking aloud or merely ‘thinking’ the words.

  ‘Could you,’ she began and hesitated, but his expression seemed so friendly she decided to take the plunge.

  ‘Could you tell me where I am?’

  He smiled.

  ‘You are in the palace of the King,’ he said proudly.

&
nbsp; ‘Oh,’ she said, and the flatness of her voice indicated that this meant nothing to her.

  ‘Come,’ he said, and he gestured for her to follow.

  He took her across the white sunlit courtyard into the dark interior of a chamber and there he fetched an object and held it up to the sunlight that came shafting through the entrance. He held it with both hands above his head as though it were some kind of sacred object. She looked up and her eyes were dazzled as the sunshine glanced off and spun from a cup of gold of such beauty that she could scarcely breathe as she gazed upon it. As her eyes grew more accustomed to staring into the concentrated light of its surface she noted that there was a design beaten upon it, a design of bulls. Two bulls charging each other. So powerful was the impression of vigorous life within their rippling golden muscles, she almost stepped back as though they could harm her. Her sense of scale, of what was moving and what was not, of what was within her and what was without, had long since disappeared. If she had ever thought to put a limit to what is real and what is not she would have abandoned the attempt now.

  She knew this was all happening to her. She had a strong sense that it was real . . . and yet . . . and yet . . . it was like nothing she had ever experienced before. The cup was real. She was sure she could reach up and touch it, and yet at the same time . . . as she gazed at it, it was no longer a cup but an experience of sun, of gold, of fear and thundering hooves and tossing horns . . . an experience of overwhelming power and light.

  She met the eyes of the old man and in them she saw herself reflected.

  But it was not an image of herself. It was Maal, and Maal as a young man as she had never seen him.

  She shut her eyes and for the first time she felt afraid of the strangeness of it all.

  * * * *

  ‘Kyra,’ a voice said gently.

  She opened her eyes and Maal, the old man, was outside her, looking deep into her eyes with affectionate concern. Around him the dark carved wood of the columns of his house enclosed them in familiar comfort. She dropped her head upon her chest wearily.

  She was tired . . . so tired . . .

  ‘Sleep,’ he said gently, helping her to lie down. ‘You will feel better after sleep.’

  ‘So tired . . .’ she murmured to herself.

  She wanted to think about the experiences she had just been through but she was too tired.

  ‘Another time . . .’ she whispered as she drifted off into a blessed dreamless sleep.

  * * * *

  When she awoke Maal was still with her. She sat up and looked round her hastily, worried that she might have slipped unwittingly into yet another strange place.

  ‘It is all right,’ he said. ‘You are here in your own village where you feel most at home.’

  She remembered the experience in the strange palace.

  ‘Tell me,’ he said quietly.

  ‘Do you not know?’ she asked. ‘You were there.’

  ‘Tell me,’ he repeated gently.

  She told him everything.

  ‘What was it?’ she asked when she had finished. ‘Why did I seem to be you?’

  ‘You were not travelling in the way you did before when you saw Wardyke and Thorn. In a sense you were not travelling at all. You were identifying with me and experiencing my memories.’

  ‘You mean all that happened to you once when you were a young man and you were remembering it in this room now, and I somehow was inside your mind remembering it as though it had happened to me?’

  ‘Something like that,’ Maal said smiling.

  Kyra was silent for a while thinking about the complexities of it.

  ‘Did it really happen to you?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘I mean, did you really go there . . . to that very place?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Why was it that only that one man could see me . . . I mean, you?’

  Maal looked as though he did not know where to begin to explain it to her.

  ‘You see . . .’ he began hesitatingly, but she interrupted. She felt she must get it straight.

  ‘You were really there?’ she insisted.

  Maal laughed and threw up his hands.

  ‘Real? Really? What do the words mean?’

  ‘You know what I mean by them,’ cried Kyra.

  ‘What do you mean by them?’ he said with a touch of gentle irony in his voice.

  ‘I mean . . . quite simply . . . that you were there as I am here now.’

  ‘And how are you here now?’ he asked quietly.

  She was stunned.

  ‘I am here!’ she shouted indignantly.

  He just looked at her, and for a terrible moment she was not sure if she was there now or not. After all, the experience in the palace had felt just as real.

  But he saw her distress and decided she had had enough insecurity for one day.

  ‘I will explain,’ he said soothingly, ‘as best I can. I was not “really” there in the sense I think you mean. My body that you can touch in this room at this moment was not there. But the inner me, the spirit me, was really there.’

  ‘You mean you “travelled” in the way I did when I saw Wardyke and Thorn that day?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘And the other people could not see you because you were in your spirit body, but the one old man could because he was a trained priest?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘That was a real golden cup he held up for me to see?’ she said wonderingly, her voice filled with awe.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Somewhere in the world at this very moment that gold cup still exists?’

  ‘Very probably.’

  ‘Oh Maal,’ she cried, ‘I wish I could see it again. I wish I could hold it in my hand.’

  ‘Maybe you will one day. I know there is a long journey in your life.’

  ‘You mean a real journey . . . I mean in my body . . . not just spirit travelling?’

  He smiled at the epithet ‘just.’ How she had already come to take one of the greatest wonders of the universe for granted. ‘But then,’ he thought, ‘so do we all,’ and he fingered the green and delicate shell of a sea urchin that he wore on a thong around his neck.

  She flushed slightly, realizing what she had said.

  ‘Yes,’ he said smiling, ‘a “real” journey.’

  ‘Where to?’

  ‘That I do not yet know.’

  ‘When will you know?’

  ‘You will know when it is time.’

  ‘How will I know?’

  ‘There will be an omen, a sign.’

  ‘How will I recognize it?’

  ‘You will recognize it,’ he said with confidence.

  She did not look so sure.

  He wondered if he should tell her more about the nature of omens.

  He wondered if he should tell her that omens are around us all the time. Everything is an omen if we choose to make it so. What makes an omen work is something in ourselves. We sense something from deep within us, on a level in which we are not used to being conscious, and we choose something from the ‘outside’ world to project it onto, to make it understandable for us. For instance, she would sense a need to take a journey, a readiness, a ripeness . . . and because she was not used to recognizing such deep instinctual drives she would see a giant bird flying or a wind blowing a tree in a particular way and she would believe it was an omen telling her to go. She would think the message was coming from outside herself.

  If she saw the same bird flying, the same tree bending, when she was not ready to go, she would not see them as omens at all. It was another case of what was reality. The omens were real, but not in the sense the people believed them to be.

  He looked at her and decided she was not ready to recognize omens as part of herself. She had too much that was new already to cope with. It would be more comfortable for her to believe as most people believed, that omens were messages from the gods telling one what to do. Making decisions for oneself was always difficu
lt and it was a sign of maturity when one could take responsibility for decisions. Kyra was maturing rapidly, but she was still a long way from this point.

  ‘Will it tell me where to go?’ she asked anxiously.

  ‘Yes,’ he said comfortingly, ‘it will tell you everything.’

  ‘But . . .’

  ‘No,’ he said firmly, ‘I have answered enough questions for one day. You will know everything you need to know when it is time to know it. Go home now, child. Relax. Everything is working out well.’

  ‘I did everything right today?’ she asked, anxious for confirmation.

  ‘You did.’ He patted her gently on the shoulder. ‘But now it is time to be Kyra again, the daughter in a family.’

  She slipped out of the priest’s house and ran home, overjoyed to be greeted by the noisy barking of Faro’s dog and the crying of her baby sister wanting to be fed.

  Chapter 11

  The Visit

  While Kyra was having these experiences with Maal, and Karne was at work on Maal’s tomb, Fern was disturbed in her green world by an unexpected and unwelcome visit from Wardyke. She was digging a small patch of earth not far from the clearing Maal and Kyra were wont to use for Kyra’s ‘travelling’ lessons and she was singing as she worked. The sun was warm on her back and a friendly robin was perched on a clod of earth nearby, glad to see her disturbing the earthworms. Every time she stopped digging for a moment to rest, he would swoop in, tug out a worm and fly off to deliver it to his hungry family. Other birds were singing in the trees and the scent of summer honeysuckle was heavy in the air.

  She first sensed something was wrong when she paused in her own song and noticed that the birds had gone quiet. The robin who should have been back from his mission to his family had not returned and there was a distinct feeling of waiting and tension in the air. She straightened up her back and kept quiet, trying to work out what could be wrong. She noticed she was no longer in sunlight and yet sunlight was everywhere else. The shadow of a man had fallen over her and she could feel the chill of it on her bare arms. She spun round to find Wardyke standing a few paces from her, his arms folded and his face brooding as he stared at her. As far as she could remember he had never been there before, although she had heard that he had visited every one else within the first few weeks of his arrival in their community. She had been glad she lived so far away from the village, so hidden by the shoulder of a hill and the cloak of the wood. She had seen him when she went to the village and had taken the measure of him very quickly. What she had learned of him from Maal had not surprised her but had only confirmed what she already suspected.