But suddenly the gods answered in a way no one had ever seen them answer before on the night of the rising star.
It was as though a dark hand seized a group of stars and flung them to the earth. With a sharp intake of breath, the villagers saw the burning embers fall from the heavens in a shower of swift and vivid light. As suddenly as it happened, it was over.
Wardyke was temporarily silenced, shocked by the unexpectedness of the meteor shower, but before the villagers had recovered their breath he was in charge of himself again.
He bowed his head, and this was the only time since he came to the village anyone had seen him bow, and said in a deep and apparently humble voice,
‘We thank you, gods, for this sign of your favour. With this burning seal of light you have sealed forever with your approval the appointment of Wardyke as your natural spokesman upon the earth.’
Bewildered, the villagers looked at each other. They had put a different interpretation on the sign of the falling stars. But who could say which was the one the gods intended?
* * * *
Not long after this Wardyke dismissed them all and they silently dispersed, the villagers to watch beside their friends over the bodies of the two young people, some of the strangers to their homes, and some to prowl the night watching that the villagers gave no more trouble to their lord and master . . . Wardyke.
Fern, Karne and Kyra remained behind some bushes, well hidden, watching Wardyke. The torches were burning low and they could not see as clearly as they had done, but they could still follow his movements. He walked the circle as Maal had done the first time they watched him, touching his forehead to each stone. He then leaned against the leaning stone, extending his immensely long arms on either side to touch the two uprights, shut his eyes and went into the kind of trance state that they had become familiar with since knowing Maal.
Kyra put her head in her hands and cringed as though she could feel great pain. Fern and Karne looked at each other worriedly over her head, but did not interfere. Kyra’s role was not an easy one, but it was necessary. They were finished with games and childhood now. On her shoulders rested the lives of many people.
Wardyke remained still for a long time and then suddenly strode out of the circle. As he passed the brightest remaining torch they could see his expression quite clearly. It was angry and disappointed. He strode down the path and out of sight, the very sound of his footsteps giving away the impatience he was feeling.
When they were quite sure he was out of earshot Karne and Fern asked Kyra what had happened.
They were amazed to find her smiling triumphantly.
‘I tried to play a trick on him,’ she said joyfully, ‘and it worked!’
‘What did you do?’ Karne asked, surprised at her daring.
‘I thought the deaths of Maal and Mia and the boy, over and over again as vividly as I could manage. I was determined he should suffer at least a little for what he has done.’
Karne was impressed.
‘Do you think he saw the images you were trying to project upon him?’
‘I am sure he did. You saw how he looked when he left the circle. I do not think he managed to do any spirit travelling at all. Whenever he turned to try and leave the circle an image of one of the people he murdered came before him, blocking his way.’
‘You took a terrible risk,’ Fern said anxiously. ‘What if he had suspected that it was your doing?’
‘I had to be very careful not to project anything I did not want him to know.’
‘Do you think he has any idea how it happened?’
‘I do not think so. He has never really noticed me and I am sure he has no idea anyone in the village has any special powers now that Maal is dead.’
Kyra could not help feeling pleased with herself. Karne was delighted as well, but Fern was still uneasy. She knew Wardyke was no fool. He had spirit-travelled many times and would know this failure had some special explanation. With his skill it would not take him long to track down the reason.
‘I am afraid for you, Kyra,’ she said.
Kyra wondered if she had been wrong to do what she had done.
‘Perhaps it was a mistake, perhaps it was not,’ Karne said. ‘At any rate it is done, and it is now time for you to go into the circle and find the Lords of the Sun.’
Kyra swallowed hard. So it had come at last!
He took her hand and led her to the circle, but before she went inside he put out the remaining torches one by one so that no one would see her. At first the darkness was so intense that they found it difficult to move about, but as their eyes grew accustomed to it the stones loomed darkly against a less dark sky and they could orientate themselves.
Karne kissed Kyra on the cheek and hugged her close.
‘Little sister, do not be afraid. We will be right here. If it looks as though things are going wrong we will rush in, Sacred Circle or no Sacred Circle, and rescue you.’
‘Promise?’ she said in a very small voice.
‘I promise.’
Fern kissed her too and held her very close.
‘If there were another way . . .’ Kyra said in a low voice.
‘If there were another way,’ Karne said softly, ‘Maal would have told us about it. He believed you could do it. For his sake, at least try.’
Kyra nodded dumbly and broke away from their comforting and loving arms. She knew the urgency. She knew the necessity . . . it was just that she felt so very small and the Sacred Stones that loomed out of the darkness seemed so very large.
She passed through into the circle itself and stood for a moment or two looking upwards at the sky. As she did so the giant stones themselves seemed small and insignificant against the vast and arching dome of infinity above.
It seemed to her all scale and measure had altered instantly as she entered the circle. She now was the pin-point centre of the universe; the millions upon millions of stars that rode the darkness above her were turning on the centre point of herbeing. The earth itself beneath her feet no longer felt like grass and sand, but like a huge ball of living rock which turned slowly and inexorably with the stars. She rode the earth like a ship that sailed the sky. But even as she felt all this, the scale and image changed again. From being the minute point on which vastness turned, she was vastness itself and all that was happening was happening within herself. All these stars moving were moving within her, the earth turning was turning within her. As she had looked up and out, she now looked in, and saw the same vision.
Somewhere in her mind she remembered she had something important to do. And as much as she would have liked to stay and enjoy the constantly changing visionary experience, she knew she must fulfil her purpose there or many people would be lost.
It seemed to her she heard Karne’s voice in her head reminding her.
Slowly she moved, trying to think what she must do first.
She remembered the configuration. She must be sure that was right if she was to travel as far as was needed to find the Lords of the Sun.
She noticed with one part of her mind that she was not so much afraid as she had expected to be. She felt she was moving in some strange dream. The reality around her was very different to the one to which she was accustomed as Karne’s sister.
She looked up at the sky again, trying not to let the filigree of gold seduce her from her task. She tried to see the pattern in the stars she had seen when she had held Maal’s stone sphere.
At first she saw nothing but brilliant and random lights. Then she thought to focus on the star Magus which was directly above the stone of the star at this time. As it became for her the brightest and most central point in the sky, the rest of the stars seemed to fall into place around it in a specific way. The configuration! It must be! It looked so right!
She felt strange as though there were currents of power running through her, circling round her. Slowly, as though already in a trance, she walked from stone to stone, touching each as she had done before w
ith her forehead. This time with each touch she seemed to be becoming more and more in tune with the vibrations of power that were all around her, so that by the end she no longer felt them as vibrations outside herself but as part of her own inner rhythm.
When she came to close her eyes upon the final stone she was completely at one with the forces in the Sacred Circle and she slipped out of her body with no trouble at all.
Karne and Fern fancied they heard a faint humming coming from the stones but could not be sure. They crouched in the darkness just outside, their arms around each other to keep fear at bay, watching Kyra’s every move within the circle. At first they were worried that she was taking too long, and Karne wished impatiently that she would stop staring at the sky. But now that she had started the process of travelling, he was content to wait as long as it would take.
How he longed to be with her! How he longed to see what she was seeing.
* * * *
She found herself standing in the yellow dust of a road, a high wall built of stone of the same colour on her right, stretching a long way past her in both directions. She stepped back somewhat to get a better view of the height of the wall and saw upon it for the first time a disc of dazzling gold. It was pure and plain, no carvings, no attachments. The polished gold of the sun. Against its surface the real sun, high in the sky, was reflected, the beam of its brilliant light touching the disc and bouncing back along a straight line to fall upon a building many measures away. Within the courtyard of the building a tower, on which another such disc was placed carefully at an angle, reflected the light yet again and beamed it further across the landscape where it was picked up and reflected on. Kyra could see that where she was standing must have been the highest point because she could see for a long way in every direction. Below her a landscape of great subtlety and harmony unfolded, low and gently rising hills were separated by water courses threading their way, beaded with willow trees. Buildings with strangely peaked roofs were upon the surface of the land so naturally placed that they looked as though they had grown from the earth. It seemed to her the whole was held together within the golden network of the sun’s light reflected from disc to disc.
She looked for an entrance to the wall beside her, remembering the citadel she had visited as the young Maal, although she realized instinctively that this was not in the same country. As there seemed to be no entrance, she turned her attention to the building nearest to her in the valley and decided to walk towards it. There was something compelling about the ray of light that beamed from the disc directly above her head to the disc on the tower of the building. She followed it and found there was a path leading directly to it.
As she approached she realized it was much larger than she had thought. The plan as seen from above was a series of squares and circles within each other.
The outer wall surrounded a square. Within that great square, smaller squares of even shape and size surrounded a central courtyard. The squares themselves consisted of rooms built round small courtyards. The great central courtyard and each smaller one had the same design. Although they were constructed as squares, within them circular fountains and flowers of every kind of beauty were planted in circular beds so that, looking from above, there were circles within all the squares. The central tower itself was square, but the disc of the sun that was placed upon it was circular. Kyra remembered something Maal had told her that she had not quite grasped before.
‘The circle is the symbol of the spirit. It contains within itself its own completeness, which has no end. The square is the symbol of the earth, of body, of material things, made up of angles and relationships. The circle within the square is spirit manifest in body.’
‘This must be some kind of temple,’ Kyra thought. ‘Perhaps here I will find the Lords of the Sun.’
* * * *
She found to her surprise that one moment she was looking down upon the temple, contemplating the harmony and the symbolism of its overall design, and the next she was standing in the central courtyard, the water of a ring of fountains softly singing to her, the scent of a thousand varied flowers soothing her. The sun disc on the tower above her gave her the feeling that the people who had built the tower were accustomed to using knowledge gained from nature in an orderly and significant way.
‘If only Fern could see this garden,’ she thought. It did not have the wild profusion of Fern’s garden. It was much more formal and controlled. Beds of contrasting colours were placed to form a pattern within the whole, where Fern had flowers of every colour growing together instinctively forming a beautiful relationship. Kyra was impressed with the formal elegance of the design and moved by the feeling of peace and security it engendered, but if she were asked she would have to say she preferred the feeling she had in Fern’s garden, which was one of overwhelming joy and pleasure at the sheer fact of living and growing.
Someone had joined her in the courtyard. She spun round to see a man watching her. He was small and wizened with age, his skin folded in hundreds of wrinkles; his eyes, which were a strange and slanting shape, like black beads.
She found herself bowing to him with respect. He acknowledged the obeisance with a slight inclination of his own head. He did not seem particularly surprised to see her, though he was curious.
He walked towards her and then circled round her looking her over very carefully. She was suddenly aware that she must look as strange to him as he to her – a fourteen-year-old girl, slim, wiry, fair hair in a loose plait down her back, brown, rough woollen dress tied at the waist with a leather thong, sandals of leather with thongs crisscrossed over bare legs. He was clad in a soft flowing garment, of a cloth so fine and shining she could not imagine how it could be woven. It hid his whole body so that when he walked he seemed to glide. Traced on his cloak was the shape of an animal in coloured threads, a kind of serpent, with legs and jaws breathing fire.
She stared fascinated, and as she stared she began to understand things. She understood somehow that this was a dragon, a symbol to these people of the unseen forces of the Universe that move throughout the sky and the earth revitalizing it with spirit. She understood somehow that this idea was similar to that spoken of by Maal and Fern, the lines of power and force that flow through the earth and can be tapped and used by all living things.
These people seemed as a whole to take much more interest in this idea than her own did. She understood the man before her had a special kind of knowledge, a knowledge of these lines of power, and his task was to plot them for the people so that they could use them, build upon them, design their lives around them. She realized suddenly that the beauty and the harmony with which the man-made constructions she had seen from the top of the hill fitted so perfectly into the landscape was probably due to the skill of this man in plotting the flow currents of the dragon spirit. She realized also that the system of alignments in straight lines from one Sacred point to another used by her own people was crude compared to the subtle following of curving and constantly changing flow paths that these people had mastered. She wished Maal was still alive so she could discuss it with him.
She looked with even greater respect than she had at first at the small figure before her.
He was shorter than she was, yet had such presence she would not have dared cross him in any way.
She found herself asking him if he were one of the Lords of the Sun. This she did in her mind, forming images, not in the words of her own race.
He in his turn spoke no words, but lifted his delicate hand and indicated that she should follow him.
She left the bright and beautiful garden, the colourful butterflies, the bees and singing water, and entered the chill darkness of an enormous chamber. At first the contrast from the sunlight shining on so many light surfaces to the shadows of the room made it impossible for her to see anything at all. But when her eyes grew accustomed to the change, she could see a man of great bulk sitting cross-legged in front of a small brazier, gazing into the embers with gr
eat concentration. The little man she was with indicated she should draw nearer. The huge man did not look up even though her sandal scuffed against something and made a noise.
‘Perhaps he cannot see me,’ she thought.
But even as she thought it she knew the answer was that he was very well aware of her presence, but was not yet prepared to break off what he was doing. He went on staring into the small fire so long she became restless and began to look around.
Several large bronze vessels caught her eye, one in particular lit clearly by the light coming through the door from the courtyard. It was huge and cast with great skill, and designs that reminded her of the fiery serpent on the cloak of her new friend, but somehow more formalized, covered the surface, which was broken up into three main sections. The base on which the heavy vessel stood itself was decorated most beautifully, and the centre section, which was the largest and seemed to be a container casket of some sort, was decorated among other things with two piercing eyeballs.
‘To keep off evil spirits,’ Kyra thought.
The lid was heavy and dependable, but also beautiful. She had never seen such bronze work in her whole life. What kind of people could these be to have such knowledge, such temples, such gardens, such fine and shining cloth? She had never seen such skill with metal, nor imagined there would be gold enough anywhere to decorate the landscape with discs to represent the sun.
She felt eyes upon her and turned to see that both men were looking at her. When they were sure they had her attention they pulled something out of the fire with little bronze tongs. She stepped forward to see more clearly and found that they had what looked like pieces of bone on a dish of bronze in front of them. The bone was crisscrossed with delicate little cracks probably from the heat of the fire. Both men concentrated on them, bending low and ignoring her again. She wandered about the room, noticing the door into another smaller courtyard and finding it an exquisite miniature of the central one, but without the tower. All the flowers in this one were scarlet and their rich colour fairly took her breath away. She found more bronze vessels of many different sizes and shapes. One small jug in the shape of an owl she longed to take home with her to show to Fern and Karne.
The Tall Stones Page 18
