The Paradise War
( The Song of Albion - 1 )
Stephen Lawhead
Lewis Gillies is pursuing graduate work in Celtic studies at Oxford when his rich roommate, Simon Rawnson, slips through a hole in a cairn to the land of the Tuatha de Danann. With the help of an eccentric professor, Lewis pursues Simon and finds himself playing a major role in some important Celtic myths. In retelling these myths, Lawhead ( Arthur ) allows his characters to become unspecific archetypes who therefore fail to hold the reader’s interest. As he is herded from event to event, Lewis, supposedly a Celtic scholar, fails to recognize the import of these occurences. Throughout, Lawhead tells his readers what to feel rather than letting his story move them.
Stephen Lawhead
The Paradise War
Book One in The Song of Albion Trilogy
Chaper 1
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 awhile, 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 RSPCA 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 lead 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 in the sixth century or so.»
«Fascinating,» I replied.
Simon shoved the folded paper under my nose. I saw a grainy, badly printed photo of a huge black mound that might or might not have been mammalian in nature. Standing next to this ill-defined mass was a grim-looking middle-aged man holding a very long, curved object in his hands, roughly the size and shape of an old-fashioned scythe. The object appeared to be attached in some way to the black bulk beside him.
«How bucolic! A man stmding next to a manure heap with a farm implement in his hands. How utterly homespun,» I scoffed in a fair imitation of Simon himself.
«That manure heap, as you call it, is the aurochs and the implement in the farmer's hinds is one of the animal's horns.»
I looked at the photo agan and could almost make out the animal's head below the great slope of its shoulders. Judging by the size of the horn the animal would have been enormous-easily three or four times the size of a normal cow. «Trick photography,» I declared.
Simon clucked his tongue. «I am disappointed in you, Lewis. So cynical for one so young.»
«You don't actually believe this-« I jabbed the paper with my finger, «this trumped-up tripe, do you? They make it up by the yard-manufacture it by the carload!»
«Well,» Simon admitted, picking up his teacup and gazing into it, «you're probably right.»
«You bet I'm right,» I rowed. Prematurely, as it turned out. I should have known better.
«Still, it wouldn't hurt to check it out.» He lifted the cup, swirled the tea, and drained it. Then, as if his mind were made up, he placed both hands flat on the tabletop and stood.
I saw the sly set of his eyes. It was a look I knew well and dreaded. «You can't be serious.»
«But I am perfectly serious.»
«Forget it.»
«Come on. It will be an adventure.»
«I've got a meeting with my adviser this afternoon. That's more than enough adventure for me.»
«I want you with me,» Simon insisted.
«What about Susannah?» I countered. «I thought you1 were supposed to meet her for lunch.»
«Susannah will understand.» He turned abruptly. «We'll take my car.»
«No. Really. Listen, Simon, we can't go chasing after this ox thing. It's ridiculous. It's nothing. It's like those fairy rings in the cornfields that had everybody all worked up last year. It's a hoax. Besides, I can't go-I've got work to do, and so have you.»
«A drive in the country will do you a world of good. Fresh air. Clear the cobwebs. Nourish the inner man.» He walked briskly into the next room. I could hear him dialing the phone and, a moment later, he said, «Listen, Susannah, about today… terribly sorry, dear heart, something's come up… Yes, just as soon as I get back… Later… Yes, Sunday, I won't forget… cross my heart and hope to die. Cheers!» He replaced the receiver and dialed again. «Rawnson here. I'll be needing the car this morning… Fifteen minutes. Right. Thanks, awfully.»
«Simon!» I shouted. «I refuse!»
This
is how I came to be standing in St. Aldate's on a rainy Friday morning in the third week of Michaelmas Term, drizzle dripping off my nose, waiting for Simon's car to be brought around, wondering how he did it.
We were both graduate students, Simon and I. We shared rooms, in fact. But where Simon had only to whisper into the phone and his car arrived when and where he wanted it, I couldn't even get the porter to let me lean my poor, battered bicycle against the gate for half a minute while I checked my mail. Rank hath its privileges, I guess.
Nor did the gulf between us end there. While I was little above medium height, with a build that, before the mirror, could only be described as weedy, Simon was tall and regally slim, well-muscled, yet trim-the build of an Olympic fencer. The face I displayed to the world boasted plain, somewhat lumpen features, crowned with a lackluster mat the color of old walnut shells. Simon's features were sharp, well-cut and clean; he had the kind of thick, dark, curly hair women admire and openly covet. My eyes were mouse gray; his were hazel. My chin drooped; his jutted.
The effect when we appeared in public together was, I imagine, much in the order of a live before-and-after advertisement for Nature's Own Wonder Vitamins & Handsome Tonic. He had good looks to burn, and the sort of rugged and ruthless masculinity both sexes fmd appealing. I had the kind of looks that often improve with age, although it was doubtful that I should live so long.
A lesser man would have been jealous of Simon's bounteous good fortune. However, I accepted my lot and was content. All tight, I was jealous too-but it was a very contented jealousy.
Anyway, there we were, the two of us, standing in the rain, traffic whizzing by, buses disgorging soggy passengers on the busy pavement around us, and me muttering in lame protest. «This is dumb. It's stupid. It's childish and irresponsible, that's what it is. It's nuts.»
«You're right, of course,» he agreed affably. Rain pearled on his driving cap, and trickled down his waxed-cotton shooting jacket.
«We can't just drop everything and go racing around the Country on a whim.» I crossed my arms inside my plastic Poncho. «I don't know how I let you talk me into these things.»
«It's my utterly irresistible charm, old son.» He grinned disarmingly. «We Rawnsons have bags of it.»
«Yeah, sure.»
«Where's your spirit of adventure?» My lack of adventurous spirit was something he always threw at me whenever he wanted me to go along with one of his lunatic exploits. I preferred to see myself as stable, steady-handed, a both-feet-on-the-ground, practical-as-pie realist through and through.
«It's not that,» I quibbled. «I just don't need to lose four days of work for nothing.»
«It's Friday,» he reminded me. «It's the weekend. We'll be back on Monday in plenty of time for your precious work.»
«We haven't even packed toothbrushes or a change of underwear,» I pointed out.
«Very well,» he sighed, as if I had beaten him down at last, «you've made your point. If you don't wish to go, I won't force you.»
«I'll go alone.» He stepped into the street just as a gray Jaguar Sovereign purred to a halt in front of him. A man in a black bowler hat scrambled from the driver's seat and held the door for him.
«Thank you, Bates,» Simon said. The man touched the brim of his hat and hurried away to the porters' lodge. Simon glanced at me across the rain-beaded roof of the sleek automobile, and smiled. «Well, chum? Going to let me have all the fun alone?»
«Damn you, Simon!» I shouted, yanked the door open and ducked in. «I don't need this!»
Laughing, Simon slid in and slammed the door. He shifted ~ into gear, then punched the accelerator to the floor. The tires squealed on the wet pavement as the car leapt forward. Simon yanked the wheel and executed a highly illegal U-turn in the middle of the street, to the blaring of bus horns and the curses of cyclists.
Heaven help us, we were off.
Chapter 2
Doom on the Halfshell
There are worse things than cruising up the M6 in a Jaguar Sovereign with Handel's Water Music bathing the ragged aural nerve ends. The car tops ninety without a murmur, without a shimmy. Silent landscape glides by effortlessly. Cool leather imparts a loving embrace. Tinted glass shades the way-worn eye. The interior cocoons, cushioning the passenger from the shocks and alarms of the road. It is a fabulous machine. I would throttle a rhinoceros to own one.
Simon's father, a merchant banker of some obscure stripe and well on the way to a lordship one day, had bought it for his son. In much the same way, he was buying Simon a top-drawer Oxford education. Nothing but the best for dear Simey.
The Rawnsons had money. Oh, yes they did. Piles of the stuff. Some of it old; most of it new. They also enjoyed that singular attribute prized by the English above all others: breeding. Simon's great-grandmother was a duchess. His grandmother had married a lord who raised racehorses and once sold a Derby winner to Queen Victoria, thereby ensuring fame and fortune for evermore. Simon's family was one of those quietly respectable tribes that marry shrewdly and end up owning Cornwall, the Lake District, and half of Buckinghamshjre before anyone has noticed. All of which made Simon a spoiled brat, of course.
In another day and age, Simon might have been sublimely happy idling away in a honey-stoned manor house in the Midlands, training horses and hounds, and playing the country squire. But he knew too much now to be content with a life of bag balm and jodhpurs. Alas, education had ruined that cozy scenario for him.
If any man was ever untimely born, it was Simon Rawnson. All the same, he could not suppress that aristocratic strain; it declared itself in the very warp and woof of him. I could see the lad as the lord of vast estates, as a duke with scurrying minions and a stately pile in Sussex. But not as an academic. Not for Simon the ivied halls and dreaming spires. Simon lacked the all-consuming passion of the great scholar and the ambition necessary to survive the narrow cut and thrust of academic in-fighting. In short, he had a genuine aptitude for academic work, but no real need to succeed at it. As a result, he did not take his work seriously enough.
He wasn't a slouch. Nor was it a matter of simply buying his sheepskin with Daddy's fat checkbook. Simon had rightly won his pride of place with a particularly brilliant undergraduate career. But as a third-year doctoral candidate he was finding it too much work. What did he want with a degree in history anyway? He had no intention of conducting any original research, and teaching was the furthest thing from his mind. He had no higher academic aspirations at all. Two years into the program, Simon was simply going through the motions. Lately, he wasn't even doing that.
I had seen it happening-seen the glittering prize slipping away from him as he began to shirk his studies. It was a model case of graduate burn-out. One sees it often enough in Oxford and comes to recognize the symptoms. Then again, maybe Simon just aimed to protract his university experience as long as possible since he had nothing else planned. It is true that with money, college can be a cushy life. Even without money it's better than most things going.
I did not blame Simon; I felt sorry for him. I don't know what I would have done in his place. Like a lot of American students in Oxford, however, I had to justify my existence at every turn. I desperately wanted my degree, and I could not be seen to fail. I could not allow myself to be shipped sack across the pond with my tail tucked between my legs. Thus, I had a built-in drive to achieve and to succeed that Simon would never possess, nor properly understand.
That, as I think of it, was one of the principle differences between us: I have had to scrape for every small crumb I have enjoyed, while Simon does not know the meaning of the word «strive.» Everything he had-everything he was-had been given him, granted outright. Everything he ever wanted came to him freely, without merit. People made allowances for Simon Rawnson simply because of who he was. No one made allowances for Lewis Gillies. Ever. What little I had– and it was scant indeed-at least was mine because I had earned it. Merit was an alien concept in Simon's universe. It was the central fact o
f mine.
Yet, despite our differences, we were friends. Right from the start, when we drew next-door rooms on the same staircase that first year, we knew we would get on together. Simon had no brothers, so he adopted me as such. We spent our undergraduate days sampling the golden nectar of the vats at «The Turf,» rowing on the river, giving the girls a bad time, and generally behaving as well as anyone might expect two untethered Oxford men to behave.
I don't mean to make it sound as if we were wastrels and rakes. We studied when we had to, and passed the exams we had to pass with the marks we needed. We were, simply, neither more nor less serious than any two typical undergraduate students.
Upon graduation I applied for a place in the Celtic Studies program and was accepted. Being the only student from my hometown high school ever to attend Oxford, let alone graduate, was A Very Big Deal. It was written up in the local Paper to the delight of my sponsors, the American Legion Post Forty-three, who, in a giddy rush of self-congratulation, granted me a healthy stipend for books and expenses. I hustled around and scrounged a small grant to cover the rest, and, Presto! I was in business.
Simon thought an advanced degree sounded like a splendid idea, so he went in for history-though why that and not astrophysics, or animal husbandry, or anything else is beyond me. But, as I said, he had a good brain under his bonnet and his advisers seemed to think he'd make out all right. He was even offered rooms in college-a most highly sought-after situation. Places for undergrad students are scarce enough, but rooms for graduates are out of the question for any but the truly prized individual.
Privilege again, I suppose. Simon's father, Geoffrey Rawnson, of Blackledge, Rawnson and Symes Ltd, no doubt had something to do with it. But who was I to complain? Top of the staircase and furnished with a good share of the college's priceless antiques-no less than three Italian Renaissance masterpieces, carved oak panelling, Tiffany tables, a crystal chandelier, two Chippendale desks, and a red leather davenport. Nor did the regal appointments end there; we had a meticulous scout, good meals in the dining hall fortified with liberal doses of passable plonk from the college cellarer's legendary cellars, modest use of student assistants, library privileges undergrads would kill for-all that and a splendid view across the quad to the cathedral spire. Where would I get a situation like that on my own?
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