The Stone of Destiny

by Jim Ware

  “I know,” said Simon. “I’ve already mentioned it to the lad,” he added, nodding in Morgan’s direction.

  Morgan stared. So the tower was really coming down! His lab was actually about to become a thing of the past! Like birds released from a cage, his plans for the evening flew out the window. He’d have to act quickly if he wanted to salvage anything. If he didn’t start packing and moving right away, there would be no more books to study, no more pestles and mortars to pulverize the ashes of his immolations, no more alembics and Bunsen burners with which to test his theories and confect his elixirs. He could see that Simon’s lips were moving again, but he wasn’t listening to the old gray janitor. He pressed his palms to his temples and began thinking out a course of action.

  George, Moira, and Rev. Alcuin were making a slow circuit around the base of the tower, examining the seams between the huge blocks of stone, shining their light up into shadowy angles and corners, talking together in low, serious tones about structural weaknesses and square footage and the future of St. Halistan’s Church. But Morgan’s thoughts were only for his lab. I know where to find some boxes on the fifth floor, he thought, doing some quick calculations to determine how many he’d need. His stomach churning, he started up the stairs, taking the first three steps at a single leap. But even as he did so, Simon and Eny shouldered their fiddles and raised their bows.

  “A set of jigs,” proposed Simon. “How about ‘Tripping Up The Stairs’? After that we’ll go into ‘The Silver Spire’—in honor of the tower.”

  Eny nodded and they began to play. They played as Morgan had often heard them play before, but this time there was something different about the music. The instant the old man touched horsehair to strings, a fragrance like that of honeysuckle and lilacs came pouring down the steps. It washed over Morgan’s head, it caressed his face, it flooded his nostrils. Then his skin began to tingle and the hair rose up at the back of his neck. The air itself, though very still, seemed charged with invisible sparks, and the stained-glass picture of Jacob’s Ladder pulsed with color as if illuminated from behind by a chorus of dancing candles. As in the past, the soaring melody filled his brain with a wordless song: Cease striving. Let go and trust. He understood without looking back that the others knew what he was seeing and feeling—that George, Moira, and the Reverend had fallen silent and were watching the scene unfold with blank upturned faces.

  Like a traveler doggedly braving a storm—a storm of rose petals or honeyed mist—Morgan pressed forward up the stairs, resolved to reach his lab at all costs, determined to overcome any obstacle no matter how enchanting or sweet. As he climbed, he could see the ivory inlay on Simon’s fingerboard glittering like cold flame. He could see the light leaping from the tip of Eny’s bow and shimmering on her hair like a summer sunset. She blushed and turned away at his approach. But Simon smiled and got to his feet as the boy drew nearer, plying his bow furiously all the while. And when Morgan made it clear that he wanted to pass, the old man hopped up lightly to the next step—the last stone step before the landing. That was when everything changed.

  First came a dreadful shock like the blow of a celestial hammer. The walls shuddered so violently that great pieces of rock broke loose and fell crashing to the stairway and the floor. Then, with a horrible splitting sound, a huge black crevasse opened on the street side of the building and gaped from the ceiling to the door. “It’s the big one!” shouted George in a terrified voice, but Morgan knew it wasn’t; for in the next instant it became plain beyond the shadow of doubt that this was no ordinary earthquake.

  The stone step on which Simon stood fiddling began to quiver and vibrate like the tailpipe of George’s rattly old pickup truck. Then it burned with russet fire and glowed with a silvery sheen. At last it shook itself like a living, breathing creature and let out a deafening roar. It roared like a lion. It roared like a jet engine. It roared like the raging sea. Morgan cringed and covered his ears. But Simon stopped playing, bowed his head, and let his bow drop to his side.

  What happened next Morgan could never clearly recall. It was as if there had been no beginning and could be no end to the tempest of images that swept around his head and drowned his reeling senses. He was aware of nothing but a galactic hurricane of blinding illumination, a monsoon of eddying color, a deafening squall of ear-splitting sound.

  Somewhere in the midst of this dreadful swirling cyclone a shaft of hot white light shot like a spear straight down through the center of the stained-glass window and fell sizzling upon the face of the trembling, roaring stone. No sooner had it touched the step than its dazzling beam assumed the shape of Jacob’s golden ladder. As Morgan watched, the ladder stretched and grew. Up from the stairway it rose, crashing straight through the ceiling, piercing all seven stories of the tower, rocketing skyward, flinging itself out into the wide spangled night. Higher and higher it soared until its topmost rung exploded like a nova and became a distant blazing star. Then the tower’s stone walls melted like wax and dropped away like a veil of evening rain.

  After that came angels—not rosy-cheeked, ringleted cherubs like those depicted in the stained glass, but terrible, burning seraphs only vaguely or partially human in aspect and form. They burst upon Morgan’s view in a great variety of shapes and sizes, some with the faces of men and women, some with the burnished feet of bulls and calves, some with the heads of eagles or lions or lambs. All had wings like wind-blown banners, some two, some four, some six. With these pointed pennons, rainbow-hued, eye-speckled, and broad as the fantails of peacocks, they beat the air and whipped the stars from one end of the heavens to the other. Those who possessed six wings used two to veil their faces, two to cover their feet, and another two to caress the tips of their neighbors’ plumage. Every angel shone with a brilliance so unbearable that it was impossible to tell whether they were dressed in some kind of glowing raiment or whether it were merely their unclothed bodies that burned with the heat and glory of a raging furnace. Morgan could not see them at all unless he shaded his eyes and glanced aside. Up and down the golden stairway they flew, surrounded by bright-tailed comets and rings of red fire, chanting words he could not understand, singing in voices like thundering waterfalls and restless winds.

  How long all this went on Morgan had no idea, but when next he turned his eyes in Simon’s direction the old man’s appearance had been altered beyond all recognition. No longer was he bent and gray and tattered, but straight, tall, and golden-haired. A voluminous cloak of purple satin flowed from his broad shoulders, and he wore a fine white silk shirt fastened close to the body with hooks of shining gold. A chain of tiny golden apples and a ruby-encrusted brooch secured the rustling cloak at his shoulder. Around his neck gleamed a twisted silver torque, and upon his head a band of filigreed gold. Instead of a fiddle he held in his left hand a silver shield rimmed with gold and embossed with precious stones of every color; and at his side, where his bow had fallen, flashed a gold-hilted sword with a sharp blade of bright blue steel. He was standing in the middle of a group of angels, speaking with them earnestly, nodding vigorously, emphasizing his unheard words with broad and forceful gestures.

  Morgan looked away, and immediately it was as if he were falling freely through space, spinning out of control, cartwheeling through a matrix of shifting shadows and shapes and sounds where there was no longer any up or down, no in or out, no this way or that—only a bewildering sense of everything getting inextricably mixed up with everything else while he himself went careening madly right through the center of it all. At intervals he got brief glimpses of the familiar and recognizable: the brass railing on the stairway; Rev. Alcuin’s dimly glinting spectacles; a pigeon on a window ledge; Moira with her hands stretched high above her head; a leather-bound book on a stained and pitted workbench; George with his eyebrows raised in alarm; George gaping openmouthed for wonder and joy and dismay.

  At last he caught sight of Simon again—not the golden-haired S
imon of the purple cloak and flashing sword, but Simon as he had always known him: a gray-haired man in baggy pants and a drab gray coat. Once again the fiddle was on his shoulder, and once again he was coaxing torrents of sweet sound out of it with darting and skittering bow. Morgan could see Eny at his side, sawing away at her own violin as if she had been doing so from all eternity, her brows tightly knit, her mouth a thin, straight line. After a few moments of this Simon threw off his last bow stroke with an expansive flourish. Then, brandishing the bow above his head like a conquering hero, he jumped down from the last stone step.

  Morgan blinked and looked around. He was lying at the foot of the stairs, and everything had suddenly returned to normal. The angels were gone. The stars had disappeared. Jacob’s Ladder was dim and small within its black and narrow frame. The walls of the tower stood grim and silent in the high-arching shadows, shaken but not much the worse for wear. The gaping crack above the door had somehow been erased. Eny and Simon were sitting quietly on the second step below the landing, their faces placid, their bows and fiddles resting in their laps.

  “What happened?” said the voice of George. It sounded husky and shaky and unusually tentative in the lofty echoing spaces of the tower. Morgan rolled over on his side and saw the chief custodian, scrunched and crumpled as an old rag doll, sitting on the floor between his wife and Peter Alcuin. All three had their backs to the wall and their feet splayed out in front of them, as if they had been flung against the stones by the sheer force of the vision. Their faces were pale and pasty, etched with expressions of recently fled and slowly fading terror.

  Simon grunted and labored to his feet. “I had a feeling you were going ask me that,” he said. “And I suppose you really do deserve an explanation. Well then. It’s like this. This step,” he said, turning and pointing his bow at the last stone step beneath the landing, “is Lia Fail.”

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Ollamh Folla

  Moira was the first to speak.

  “If that stone is Lia Fail,” she said, pushing herself up from the floor and shoving a handful of auburn hair out of her face, “I mean, if the Stone of Destiny has been here on this stairway, right here in St. Halistan’s church, under our very noses, for all these years, and you knew it all the time—why didn’t you say so?”

  Simon rubbed the back of his neck and chuckled. “Well now. Would any of you have believed me? Would anyone have cared?”

  “She would,” said Eny. “She believed me when I told her I’d been in the Sidhe.”

  “Ay!” muttered George.

  Simon’s intractable black eyebrows arched upward to mingle with the fringes of his limp gray hair. “You’ve been in the Sidhe, missy? Well, there’s a piece of news worth knowing; though I might have guessed it—if not by your eyes, then by the way you played that last jig! But there’s a simple answer to your mother’s question. I didn’t tell because I didn’t know. I couldn’t know until the Stone revealed itself. Before this night, I had nothing to go on but bits and pieces. Theories and suspicions. Hints and clues.”

  Morgan sat up, his ears tingling. “What sort of hints and clues?”

  “As it happens,” Simon replied coolly, “they had mainly to do with your father. That’s right. You needn’t look so surprised. He was very close to uncovering the secret himself. So I came looking for him. But I came too late. That’s why I said I’d be needing your help!”

  Instantly an avalanche of doubts and fears tumbled into Morgan’s brain. Heady with the thrill of unsuspected possibilities, he got up and stood gazing into the old man’s lined face and twinkling blue eyes, silently sifting through the scores of questions that came crowding in upon him in rapid-fire succession. How much had his father known? Did he actually believe, as Peter Alcuin suggested on that earlier occasion, that this Stone of Destiny and the Philosophers’ Stone were connected? Was he really “disillusioned” with alchemy? Had he discovered another, better way to achieve his goals? Morgan opened his mouth to voice his jumbled thoughts, but before he could speak, the Reverend stepped to the base of the stairway and laid a hand on the brass rail.

  “I appreciate a good story as much as anybody else,” he said, looking up at Simon Brach. “But I have some questions about this one. For one thing, if that step is Lia Fail, then who are you?”

  Simon sat down and laid the red fiddle in its velvet-lined case. “Now that’s a tale that will take some telling,” he said, spreading his large-knuckled hands over his big bony knees. “Plenty of telling, since it’s all tied up with the story of the Stone itself.” He paused a moment, as if looking for the right place to begin. Then he said, “I’m a man of the Tuatha De Danann.”

  Moira let out a squeal and skipped over to sit on the bottom step at Peter Alcuin’s feet. “We’re all ears,” she said, smoothing her skirt and adjusting her glasses on her nose.

  “Caramba!” grumbled George.

  Simon took a long, slow breath. “I have been in this world a long while,” he said, “seeking Lia Fail. My people lost track of it after sending it into exile, and I’ve been given the job of hunting it down. I’ve been known by many different names in different times and places: Dan Sheehan, Jamie Friel, Jeremy Bran; Bedivere and Baruch, Galahad and Brendan, Irial Faidh and the Fisher King. Where I come from, they call me Ollamh Folla.”

  “Ollamh Folla!” said Eny, brightening. “I know that name! You’re the one who smuggled Lia Fail out of Ireland!”

  “To save it from the invading Milesians,” offered Moira.

  “And once it was safely away,” continued Eny, “you went underground, where your enemies couldn’t find you, with King Lugh of the Long Hand and the rest of the Danaans. That was the beginning of the Sidhe.”

  The old man smiled and nodded. “Your knowledge of the subject is good,” he said. “But not complete. I didn’t send Lia Fail out of Ireland simply to save it from the Milesians. I sent it because it had to go. That was its destiny.”

  “Because of the prophecy, you mean?”

  “That’s one way of putting it. But there’s a reason behind every prophecy. The Tuatha De Danann were never the Stone’s rightful owners. They acquired it by stealing it from others. They usurped its powers for their own gain. And though, as the ages rolled by, they attained immortality simply by virtue of its presence in their midst, they also discovered that the penalty for their theft lay in the treasured prize itself. To this day many of them still crave the Stone’s gifts and call it ‘The Satisfaction of All Desire.’ But the wisest among them know that the power of Lia Fail is a terrible burden. They have learned that unending life within the circles of the created worlds is a bitter, grinding weariness. That’s why the king’s closest advisers eventually counseled him to send Lia Fail away—beyond the edge of the world, to the Land of the Sun’s Going, as it had been foretold. I was a member of that group. We were twelve in number, and in this we were all agreed. All of us, that is, but one.”

  “The Morrigu,” whispered Eny. Morgan flinched at the name.

  Again Simon nodded. “Now these things happened, as Moira rightly says, at the time of the Milesian conquest of Ireland. Not so very long ago, as the Danaans reckon time. But this isn’t the whole story. Not by a long shot. No, if you want to understand what Lia Fail really is and where its destiny truly lies, you have to go back to the beginning. You have to go back to Bethel.” He glanced over his shoulder at the stained glass window above the landing.

  As if at a predetermined signal, Rev. Alcuin removed his spectacles and cleared his throat. Closing his eyes, he pinched the bridge of his nose and began to recite, very slowly and distinctly, in his best preaching voice:

  And Jacob went out from Beersheba, and went toward Haran. And he lighted upon a certain place, and tarried there all night, because the sun was set; and he took one of the stones of that place, and put them for his pillows, and lay down in
that place to sleep. And he dreamed, and behold a ladder set up on the earth, and the top of it reached to heaven: and behold the angels of God ascending and descending on it.… And Jacob awaked out of his sleep, and he said, Surely the LORD is in this place; and I knew it not.… And Jacob … took the stone that he had put for his pillows, and set it up for a pillar, and poured oil upon the top of it. And he called the name of that place Bethel.

  The Reverend opened his eyes and looked around. “Bethel,” he said. “That’s Hebrew for ‘House of God.’”

  “Exactly!” said Simon. “As if God could live in a rock! Though I suppose that’s not so surprising when you consider that some of Jacob’s descendents believed He could live in a box!”

  Moira sighed. “That’s a Bible story,” she said. “I thought we were talking about the Tuatha De Danann.”

  “I believe we are,” said Rev. Alcuin. “Though I’m interested to see how Simon is going to weave the threads of his tale together.”

  “Patience,” said the old man with a wink. “Now no stone can be God’s house, as the Reverend knows perfectly well. But this Stone had been touched by the divine power, and there were some unusual properties associated with it. So Jacob and his sons took it with them when they went down into Egypt. That’s where it fell into the hands of Scota, Pharaoh’s daughter, at the time of the Exodus. One of Scota’s suitors, a man named Gathelus, had filled her head with the notion that the Bethel stone was the source of Moses’ powers. She sent her servants into Goshen to lay hold of it. They seized it by force from the house of Reuel, one of the Hebrew chieftains. And when Pharaoh and his army were drowned in the Red Sea, Gathelus and Scota took the Stone and fled to Spain, where they founded the ancient kingdom of Brigantium, first home of the Tuatha De Danann. Gathelus, you see, was a Greek—one of the people Homer calls Danaoi. The Danaan race takes its name from him.”