Milo and the Dragon Cross

by Robert Jesten Upton

  “What hunt would that be?” she asked. “You don’t look like a hunter to me. I’d guessed you would be more a thistle-downer.”

  “Oh, no! I’m not a hunter, like in hunting animals. You know what the Magical Scavenger Hunt is? You do? Well, I came to be a contestant in the Magical Scavenger Hunt. It’s...more confusing the longer I’m doing it. What’s that other thing you mentioned? A thistle-downer?”

  She looked him over with an appraising eye. “I can see how you might be with the Magical Scavenger Hunt. It explains how I took you for a thistle-downer. A thistle-downer is a person who looks for traces of the Old Ways on his own instead of going to a school, such as this one, to learn the history of the Ancients. He or she wanders wherever the winds take him or her, like thistle down. ‘Course, thistle-downers are frowned on by the likes of Headmaster High-and-Mighty. Hates to get his hands dirty, grubbing around in the old places and sleeping on the hard ground instead of reading about it in books and sleeping in a soft, warm bed.”

  She moved in conspiratorially to whisper to Milo. “Personally, I have more sympathy for people like you who are willing to take the risks and the hardships of thistle-downer’s life to learn about things on their own. I figure you get what you pay your dues for, and these pampered scholars? They get what their families pay for, and that’s about it. When they go home from here all they really have is a piece of paper that says they’re better than the rest of us, and they spend the rest of their lives thinking it. Does anything come of it? ‘Course not! It’s just to be able to say they know about the Old Ways without gaining anything of the Old Wisdom. You go on,” she encouraged. “You learn all you can your own way. Maybe you’ll learn a few things that’ll help out the rest of us someday.” She gave him a smart wink and another serving of scrambled eggs.

  “Maybe that’s why Master Trevorthorne refused to help me out,” Milo mused.

  “That old stuffed shirt!” she spat. “He doesn’t know what he knows, but he’s jealous about that! He had you pegged for a thistle-downer even when that Ranger showed up looking for you. ‘Course, he wouldn’t think much of a Ranger, either, even if a Ranger carries a lot more weight than a schoolmaster. Even the schoolmaster of Rykirk Academy. That makes him dislike you even more.”

  She continued. “So, what wouldn’t he tell you?”

  “I asked about the Great Barrow,” Milo offered.

  “The Great Barrow, now!” the cook exclaimed. “And he didn’t know? The thing that Rykirk Academy claims to hold the key to? Hah!”

  “The key? To the Great Barrow?” Milo asked in astonishment.

  “Oh, yes. I may be no more than a servant at this school, but I’ve been here all my life and come from a family that’s worked here for as many generations as the school’s been here. I’ve picked up a thing or two. Yes, Rykirk was put here to be the gate to the Great Barrow.”

  “Where is it, then?” Milo asked.

  “The Great Barrow? Well, I don’t rightly know; that’s what these scholars are here for. But I know about the Gate.”

  “Where’s that?”

  “Up there, on the hill.” She indicated the hill behind the school with a kip of her head, obviously proud of her knowledge. Milo looked out through the open door in the direction. The low hill there was encircled by a massive stone wall. On the hill top was an odd-looking pile of enormous stones. “There! That’s the Gate,” she asserted, verifying that he had seen what she meant.

  “That’s the Gate?”

  “Yes, of sorts. But you can’t just go up there. You have to get through the gate in the wall first.”

  “The Gate has a gate?”

  “And a key. To prevent unauthorized access to the Gate. They don’t let just any riff-raff, like thistle-downers, go poking around up there. You have to have the permission of the headmaster to go up there, and he has the key.”

  “I think that’s a problem,” Milo ventured.

  “That’s right. Trevorthorne’s not going to let you in. It’s the last place he would let you go.”

  “Can I climb over the wall or something?”

  “Not easily, so I would advise against that. There’s still another way.”

  “What’s that?” Milo asked, puzzled.

  “My husband,” she said, smugly. “He’s the grounds keeper. He has a key so he can go inside to cut the weeds. I just might be able to influence him to leave the lock open. If he does that, you have to promise not to give away how you got in. I don’t want him to get into any trouble.”

  “Sure! I understand. I’d be glad to promise that. Can you do it?”

  “Let’s just say that I don’t have anything against poking a hole or two into Master High-and-Mighty’s self importance. Come back after dinner tonight before the procession and I’ll let you know if my husband can help. This would be a good night since it’s the dark of the moon. The procession is over by midnight and the students and faculty leave the hill. The headmaster will probably expect my husband to lock up then. You could slip in when everyone else is in bed.”

  “Procession? What sort of procession?”

  “Oh, it’s Samhain. The night when the boundaries between the worlds are at their thinnest. The whole school goes to the hill for a procession of lights around the Gate. It’s a tradition.”

  Milo left the kitchen with a full stomach and an eager heart. Bori was waiting for him outside the cottage door. “I found something I think you should see for yourself,” Bori said.

  “What is it?” Milo asked.

  “I said, you need to see it for yourself,” the cat repeated. “Come on.”

  Bori bounded away, forcing Milo to scramble to keep up with him. He led Milo to the wall surrounding the hill where the cook had told him the Gate was located. Bori showed him a grated iron door.

  “I thought this might be a perfect habitat for voles,” Bori told him. “So I came up to look around, and when I did, I saw this.”

  Milo was nervous that someone might see them. “The cook told me about this place just now,” he told the cat. “We’re going in tonight, but I don’t want to be seen here or show any sign that we’re interested in the place.”

  “This you have to see. Look.”

  Milo looked through the rusty wrought iron bars to see the jumble of huge stones on the crest of the hill. Although they seemed partially tumbled, they were clearly some sort of an ancient monument. Bori drew his attention closer, to the place where the iron gate sat in its jamb. Milo saw a hank of moon-pale hair lodged in the heavy lock.

  “Stigma’s,” Milo whispered.

  “That’s what I thought,” Bori confirmed.

  Milo plucked it out of the lock. “She was here!”

  “Yes, and I think she left this as a sign for you. She knew you would come here, and she knew the only thing she could leave you that you might recognize was her hair.”

  “I think you’re right,” Milo said, a wash of relief coming over him. This sign confirmed that Stigma hadn’t simply abandoned him. It also suggested that she had been true to her promise to guide him to the Great Barrow, even if it wasn’t in person. “Come on, Bori. Let’s get away before anybody notices us.”

  They wandered away, as if they had been on a random ramble. “Everything we’ve learned confirms that we have to get inside,” Milo told Bori. “The hank of hair Stigma left us backs up what the cook told me.”

  “Either that or she got her tail caught in the door when she slipped though,” Bori observed. “It happened to me once. I was dashing through a door that someone had opened, and it slammed—bang!—on the very tip of my tail. Caught the last tuft of hair. If I had been just a shade slower, I’d have a door-jamb shaped kink at the end of my tail.”

  “I guess that shows how risky it is to dash through closing doors,” Milo said, thinking about the possible dangers of slipping through this one.

  “I have something else to tell you as well,” Bori told him. “Before I came to the gate, I was hunting over by the ground
skeeper’s shed. Master Trevorthorne came by, talking to the cook’s husband. He told him to lock the door to our cottage as soon as we went in tonight. He said he didn’t want you to take part in the procession, whatever that is, and he didn’t want you wandering around unsupervised.”

  “That could be a problem,” Milo admitted.

  “I thought so, too. Then I had an idea. He can lock the door, but what if we weren’t inside? Then we wouldn’t be inconvenienced. We just have to be sure that everyone thinks we’re inside. I’ve found a suitable hide-out where we can stay until it’s safe to try the gate.”

  Milo got his bath before dinner, then went back to the dining hall. The students were clearly in a festive mood, but Milo and Bori were placed at a table separate from everyone else, the ‘visitor’s table.’ Only, since they were the only visitors, it kept them in isolation. When the students began clearing out, the cook came with Milo’s own clothes: patched, clean, and folded.

  “It’s all set,” she whispered. “My husband will leave the gate unlocked and ajar. You only have to promise to lock it so no one notices that he ‘forgot’ to close it properly.”

  Milo agreed. Nothing was said about the instructions from the headmaster about locking them in for the night.

  They went back into the cottage, but only long enough for Milo to change into his own clothes, and to fix the bed to look like he was in it, wrapped up in the bedclothes. Bori kept watch while Milo got ready.

  “Hurry!” the cat said. “Someone’s coming.”

  At the last instant, Milo decided to take his rucksack as well, and slipped out into the heavy shadow and around the corner before the footsteps Bori had heard arrived at the door. They heard a key stealthily turning in the lock. “Sorry, young fella,” a man muttered, “but I have to do as I’m told.”

  Milo was glad that it was a moonless night, and the deep shadow hid them as they made their way to the hiding place Bori had picked out, a dip in the rock beneath the wall some ways from the gate.

  As they crouched down in the hole-like depression, Milo looked up at the stars blazing in incredible profusion in the black satin of the night sky.

  “See those stars there?” Milo said, pointing to a group of three bright stars in a diagonal in the eastern sky. “Those are the stars of Orion’s Belt. I don’t know much about stars, but my grandfather taught me those. That star up above is his shoulder, and the ones down the side are his sword or club.”

  “They just look like stars to me,” Bori responded.

  “Yes, but it’s a human thing, seeing patterns in the stars and making stories from them. We see them as constellations, even though they don’t really have any relationships except the way they look from our point of view. Orion, for instance, we call the Hunter.”

  Milo stopped for a minute, a strange idea dawning on him. “If I recognize the same pattern of stars here as I do at home, then, this must be the same place! I’ve always thought that being here meant that I was in a completely different world, but those stars tell me that I’m not! It’s the same place in relation to the stars. This is weird.”

  “So, what does it mean, you think?”

  “I don’t know. That’s the mystery. How can it be so different if it’s the same place?”

  “Let me know when you figure it out,” Bori said, and yawned. “Look! There’s more stars!”

  Milo looked down to where the cat was staring. “No, those are candles. The procession must be starting and everyone coming out of the courtyard is carrying a candle.”

  A flow of bobbing, flickering points of light emerged from the school and flowed up the hill, clogging up briefly against the wall by the gate. Milo realized that if the cook’s husband thought that he had locked Milo and Bori into the cottage, he probably wouldn’t be leaving the gate unlocked for them.

  “We’ve got to get in with the students,” Milo told Bori. “We can’t wait until everyone is gone to get in.”

  “Then we’ll have to do it without anyone noticing us,” Bori pointed out. “I can slip in unseen as long as I can avoid getting stepped on, but what about you?”

  Milo shrugged. “We’ll just have to risk it. You go through first so you can see the inside. I’ll try to come through with the last ones.”

  Bori disappeared into the darkness almost instantly. Milo slipped along using the cover of deeper shadows along the wall for cover, thinking how Stigma would have no trouble doing this. He reached the place by the gate just as the last couple of students were passing inside, and joined on, candleless, to pass through. Once inside, he pressed himself against the wall in the deepest shadow and sidled away from the candlelight. Bori was there already, guiding him to a low place in the uneven ground where they could take cover.

  They couldn’t see much of the ceremony from there, but they could hear the indistinct drone of chanting and fragments of a single voice, probably the headmaster’s, leading the chorus. Actually, it was pretty boring. Milo dozed a little as time passed. Orion climbed higher and higher into the sky before Bori woke him.

  “They’re coming down,” the cat whispered. In silence the crowd moved back to the gate and filtered through. As the last one went out, they could hear a key scrape in the lock. They were locked in, alone.

  Milo got himself up stiffly, glancing at Orion, which stood a little past zenith. He could dimly make out the silhouette of the jumbled shapes of the boulders that were on the top. Bori, however, could see it clearly.

  “Come this way,” he told Milo, and Milo followed him, more by motion than by actually seeing him. They picked their way up the rocky slope until they arrived at the pile of huge, smooth-sided stones.

  In the starlight, Milo could make out their general shape, and distinguish a certain order to how they were situated. Bori lead him to a place where lozenge-shaped stones set on end to the right and the left made an opening. Between them was a floor of packed earth. He ran his hands over their surfaces. Except where weather had peeled away the surface, the stones were dressed and smooth. At the mouth of the opening a massive lintel of granite lay across the uprights. In the dim light, he thought he could discern a pattern of some sort pecked into the surface of the lintel, and traced it with his fingers until he recognized the shape.

  “Bori! There’s a sort of carving above the door! It’s a cross figure, like mine!”

  “Or like the one we found in the weeds at the side of the road when we went into Korrigan Forest?” Bori added. “Ready to go in? The opening’s a tunnel from here on. It’s okay, I can see and smell enough to know there’s nothing inside that we should avoid.”

  They went in, Milo ducking under the first lintel and feeling his way into a darkness that was now total, except for an occasional space between stones that allowed a star or two to peek through. Bori had the advantage of his nose and whiskers to tell him all he really needed to know to explore the space. Milo counted the pairs of stones that held up the roof, noting that each set was taller than the one before.

  “...ten, eleven, twelve...” Milo counted as he touched the flanking uprights. “Ouch!” He rubbed his forehead where he had bumped it against a lowered thirteenth lintel stone, invisible in the darkness.

  “Come this way,” Bori said. “It opens up on the inside.”

  Milo had to stoop to pass through this doorway, and as soon as he did he felt, rather than saw, that the passage opened into a chamber. The ceiling lifted away to at least three times his height. The gargantuan uprights held up a cap stone of immense size.

  “I think I know what this is,” he said. “I’ve seen pictures. It’s an ancient tomb called a passage grave.” The idea of having entered an ancient grave in the middle of the night made the hairs stand up on his neck. The feeling made him want to turn around and make his way out again, but his purpose in coming held him fast. He reached out to touch the upright stones of the wall, exploring them as he made his slow way around the circular chamber. The surfaces of the stones were tooled by the ancient masons to p
olished surfaces, revealing no features or carving that he could discern. Thirteen—there it was again—huge stones had been fit closely side by side, their lower ends buried in the ground and so huge that Milo couldn’t conceive of how such enormous weights could have been moved. Even in his own world, these stones would have strained the ingenuity of modern engineers. “Well,” he said with a sigh, “I guess we’ll have to find a way to come back here by daylight. Maybe I could see something useful then. Let’s get out of here.”

  Bori led the way and Milo followed, thoroughly unable to see the cat and waving his hands in front of him to find the passage. It was a relief to step out into the starlight under an open sky. After the total blackness, starlight seemed bright. Orion soared away to the west, headed toward its setting.

  “Wait a minute,” Milo said, puzzled. “Something’s wrong.”

  Instead of the outline of the wall that ran around the hill, Milo was seeing the tall, soft shapes of tree tops. “Bori, I don’t think we’re in Kansas anymore!”

  15

  Out the Other Side

  I don’t know anything about Kansas,” Bori told Milo, referring to the literary reference Milo had made from The Wizard of Oz, “but the moist air and scents of forest smell like we aren’t in Rykirk anymore either. I think we’ve gotten to some new place on our journey.”

  It was also a good deal chillier. Milo drew his jacket in tighter. “So, do you think we’ve gotten to the Great Barrow?” Milo asked.

  “Yes. You have,” came a female voice from somewhere close by. “I’ve been waiting for you. You found my marker?”

  “Stigma!” Milo called. “You’re here? We just came through!”

  “As I was sure you would. Welcome to Inys Raun. I was only a day ahead of you. I found the Gate by following the groundskeeper. When he opened the gate in the wall, I slipped in. Then he locked it when he left, and I was inside. That’s when I came through to arrive here. But I’d started to worry when you hadn’t arrived. The Barrow opens at dawn.”