The Stone of Destiny

by Jim Ware

  For a long moment the boy stared at the minister’s round, rubicund face, straining to understand the meaning of this latest revelation. Had John Izaak known that the last stone step on the tower stairway was actually Lia Fail? If so, how far had he been obliged to go—what had he been forced to sacrifice—in order to gain that knowledge? Did he know about the Morrigu? Did the Morrigu know about him? Something like a bolt of frigid lightning flashed through his overheated brain. He remembered what his mother had said to him about his dad: He was taken.

  “I’ve got to find her!” he said, jerking away and making a move toward the door. “I’ve got to talk to her before it’s too late! You can wait here if you want to, but I’m going! Somebody around this place must know what they’ve done with her!”

  He turned to run, but found the way blocked. Skidding to a halt, he stumbled backward just in time to avoid a collision with a tall figure standing just outside the door—a figure dressed in a white medical smock.

  “Excuse me,” said the doctor, looking stunned and apologetic. “Are you Morgan Izaak?”

  “Yes,” stammered Morgan, rubbing his eyes and backing away.

  “And the Reverend Peter Alcuin?” the doctor added, looking over the top of Morgan’s head.

  The Reverend stepped forward and took the doctor’s hand. “We came to see the boy’s mother,” he explained. “He’s just a bit confused. About not finding her here, I mean.”

  A sort of pained expression crossed the doctor’s face. “I’m terribly sorry,” he said, flipping through the papers on his clipboard. “We regret the inconvenience. I’m afraid none of us were expecting this. I certainly wasn’t.”

  Morgan turned cold and darted a glance in Rev. Alcuin’s direction. Peter shrugged and raised his eyebrows slightly.

  “The situation changed so rapidly, you see,” the doctor went on, taking out a pen and writing something on one of the sheets of paper. “We were quite taken by surprise.” He glanced up and gave Morgan what appeared to be a look of sincere pity. “I’m really very, very sorry to have upset you.”

  “Doctor,” said the Reverend, moving quickly to Morgan’s side, “if you have something to tell us, perhaps it would be best if—”

  “As I believe you already know,” the doctor continued, almost as if he hadn’t heard him, “Mrs. Izaak’s cancer had metastasized. We found spots not only in the lungs, but on the liver and in the spine. One very recent test uncovered a questionable mass in one of the lymph nodes. I’m sure you can understand our concern at that point.”

  Rev. Alcuin nodded. Morgan said nothing, but simply stared down at his feet with a hollow sinking feeling in his heart.

  “In light of the situation, you will also be able to appreciate the feelings of deep shock we experienced upon completing our last test. That was yesterday evening. Just prior to all the ruckus with the earthquake and the storm. Though we checked the results over and over again, we were unable to detect even the slightest sign of cancer.”

  With that, he turned the clipboard around and thrust it up against Peter Alcuin’s chest. Morgan could make out only a single word at the top of the page as it passed from hand to hand: Discharge.

  “Gone. Completely gone,” said the doctor with a tired smile. “The most extraordinary case I’ve seen in twenty-seven years of practice. I honestly don’t know how to account for it. Nobody does. You’re probably aware that oncologists rarely use the word ‘cure.’ It’s safer and more sensitive to speak in terms of ‘remission.’ All I can tell you is that, in this instance, I’m sorely tempted to ignore such protocol. A most remarkable case. Now if you’ll be so good as to get these papers signed and turned in to the business office, I’ll be off. You’ll have to forgive my abruptness. It’s been a long night.” And with that he was gone.

  “Morgan! I’m so glad you came to meet me! Thank you, Peter, for bringing him!”

  Together they turned and saw Morgan’s mother standing there, as big as life and as alive as she could ever be. She was dressed in her street clothes: a denim skirt, a plain white linen blouse, and a light beige sweater thrown loosely over her shoulders. In one hand she held her purse, in the other a canvas shopping bag that bulged with a miscellany of personal items. Her sparse, whitish hair, which had thinned considerably, was mostly hidden beneath a big blue scarf, and her high, narrow cheekbones were still alarmingly prominent beneath her transparent parchmentlike skin. But there was a rosy glow in her cheeks and on her forehead that Morgan had not noticed during his last visit, and her gray eyes sparkled with life.

  “Forgive me for keeping you waiting,” she said. “I was just getting my things together and saying good-bye to the nurses. They’ve been so good to me here!”

  Morgan ran to her and hugged her neck. “I don’t understand,” he said through a fresh set of tears. “I did everything wrong! And you still got well!”

  Mavis laughed. “What a funny thing to say! None of this is about you or anything you’ve done! It’s about grace! What else can I say? Grace is enough.”

  Morgan smiled up at her. “It’s more than enough,” he said.

  Peter Alcuin stepped up and threw his arms around the two of them. Morgan hugged his mother again and again, pressing his wet face tightly against her shoulder. Laughing in his embrace, she dropped her canvas bag and lifted a hand to stroke her boy’s unruly yellow hair.

  “Isn’t it wonderful?” she said. “We’re going home!”

  Epilogue

  There were deer on the Point—four dun-colored does and a spotted fawn—when Eny, fiddle in hand, came over the footbridge and took the path down to La Cueva de los Manos. They kept to the shadows under the spindly pines as she passed, cropping the thistles and chewing the lace lichen off the low-branching trees. Lithe, sleek, and majestic they seemed, but not in the least uncanny. Not one of them had red ears or fiery eyes.

  A warm, dry breeze was blowing off the land and sweeping out over the ocean. It tossed the spray around and fluffed up specks of foam on the crests of the waves. Not a shred of mist nor a puff of cloud obscured the blue dome of the sky from the hills to the violet horizon. No engulfing sea of fog rolled toward the shore, no stalking shadow bent its head beneath the arch of stone. There were no green islands winking out through sudden windows in the west.

  Sea lions barked between the echoing cliffs as she tramped along, groaning and grumbling at one another as they lolled across the rocks and sported in the surf. Eny laughed at them, wondering how sailors could ever have mistaken such awkward brutes for mermaids. Blackbirds twittered among the branches and bracken, calling to her distantly from the steep wooded heights above the emerald lagoon. But they did not know her name, and their song, though lovely and lissome, was innocent of enchantment.

  Down through the breakers she waded, the sun hot on the back of her neck. Up over the rocky terraces she trudged, splashing and dripping with brine. Standing on the lonely strip of sand below the Cave she saw hermit crabs go scuttling over the black rocks. Bright blue anemones and orange starfish glittered in the tidal pools. Shoals of mussels shone like ebony beneath the shimmering surface of the water. But nothing even remotely like a human shape could she discern anywhere along that gray and empty stretch of sea-washed gravel. Cormorants dived, gulls wheeled, kestrels soared. There was not a single crow among them.

  Within the Cave of the Hands she found no tracks. No sign that coracles had been dragged across the sand. No slings, no stones, no forgotten leather bags. The whole place looked exactly as it had always looked: intimate, friendly, ordinary. She cocked an ear to listen but heard no muffled voices, no rasping croaks and caws among the shadows, no strains of harp music beckoning to her from the depths of the earth. She searched but found no doorway between the boulders—only a wall of solid, dripping stone.

  Seating herself on the sand, she took out her fiddle and rosined the bow. She
lifted her chin and turned her eyes toward the wall. There before her rose the familiar swarm of red-ochre hands, like an upwardly sweeping cascade of pure sacrificial flame. Lowering the violin, she reached out and touched them, running her fingertips softly from hand to painted hand. The words of Simon Brach came back to her: “Perhaps as if it were through fire.”

  Outside, the breakers were crashing on the shore just as they had crashed on the pebbly strand at Luimneach. The wind was singing as it had sung in the hills of Beinn Meallain. Eny closed her eyes and tried to remember. When she opened them again, there was something bobbing over the surface of the waves far out on the ocean. But it was only a commercial fishing boat.

  “I saw Tory Island,” she said to herself, “and the ships of the Tuatha De Danann. I fled from giants, fell into a whirlpool, and escaped from the Morrigu. I was there when Jacob’s Ladder touched the top of the tower stairs. I fiddled with one of the fairy folk, lived with the Fir Bolg, and handled the Stone of Destiny. Why am I neither ecstatic nor dead of fright? Was it just a dream?”

  But no sooner had the thought passed through her mind than it was followed by a prayer—the very prayer she had prayed when last she pressed her palms against these same silent hands. That’s when it occurred to her. What if the visions and enchantments were over and past? Mavis Izaak had come home. So what if the tower of St. Halistan’s had fallen amidst storms and terrors? Morgan had his mother back again. A smile came to her lips. She bowed her head against the wall. “Thank You,” she murmured into the close and holy darkness.

  For a moment she paused to exult in the music of the waves. She sat very still, breathing in the salt sea air. She savored the delights of sunlight dancing on the water.

  And then, with a flourish of her flashing bow, she picked up the fiddle and played.

  … a little more …

  When a delightful concert comes to an end,

  the orchestra might offer an encore.

  When a fine meal comes to an end,

  it’s always nice to savor a bit of dessert.

  When a great story comes to an end,

  we think you may want to linger.

  And so, we offer ...

  AfterWords—just a little something more after you

  have finished a David C Cook novel.

  We invite you to stay awhile in the story.

  Thanks for reading!

  Turn the page for ...

  • An Interview with the Author

  • Pronunciation Guide

  • Glossary

  An Interview with the Author

  This is your first novel, but not the first time you’ve told stories. What’s the difference between your previous story writing and writing a novel?

  As a matter of fact, this is my fifth work of fiction. I’ve done three Kidwitness novels for Bethany House/Focus on the Family—Crazy Jacob (about the son of the man possessed by the “legion” of demons), Dangerous Dreams (a slave girl in the house of Pontius Pilate), and The Prophet’s Kid (the son of Isaiah)—and Canyon Quest, a prequel to Focus on the Family’s Last Chance Detectives video and audio series. Even my nonfiction books have been primarily concerned with the quest for deeper meaning in stories (for example, The Lord of the Rings, The Hobbit, The Chronicles of Narnia, and traditional fairy tales), so there’s a natural overlap between the two.

  What’s the difference between writing a novel and a shorter piece of fiction? I guess the answer would have to be that it’s a much longer and more intensive discipline. There are more details to keep track of, more balls to keep in the air, more plates to keep spinning. It takes a lot of work and concentration.

  What’s your favorite story you’ve written prior to The Stone of Destiny?

  I’ve always been rather partial to Dangerous Dreams. There’s actually a connection here with The Stone of Destiny: Livy, the heroine of Dangerous Dreams, is Celtic—she’s a slave girl from Gaul—and her knowledge of Celtic myth and lore plays an important part in the story.

  Did you invent Santa Piedra, Punta Lira, and La Cueva de los Manos from your imagination or base them on real places?

  Santa Piedra was inspired by a couple of different locations in California: first and most important, Monterey and Carmel on the Central Coast (notice the rocky coastline, the crescent-shaped bay, the steep streets, the Mission, and the perpetual mists); and secondarily the Balboa Peninsula in Southern California (the Balboa Fun Zone looms large in my memories of childhood vacations). Punta Lira, like Stevenson’s Treasure Island, owes a lot to Point Lobos State Reserve, “the greatest meeting of land and water in the world.” As for the Cave of the Hands, it was suggested to my mind by a small grotto I found beside the emerald green waters of China Cove on the south side of Point Lobos—though details were provided from my readings about a similar cave which, as I understand, you can find in the Santa Lucia Mountains near Esalen, California.

  Is all this stuff about alchemy real?

  Not “real” in the sense of “factually true.” But it was believed in and practiced for centuries by some extremely intelligent people. Even today there are some folks “out there” who are pretty serious about it. The methods and techniques employed by Morgan in his experiments are based on the documented methods and techniques of famous medieval and Renaissance alchemists—people like Edward Kelly, John Dee, and Paracelsus. And the natural philosophy or “science” behind those techniques goes all the way back to Aristotle.

  I feel like you’ve got more stories of Lia Fail hiding away. Are there more to come?

  Ah! That would be giving it away, wouldn’t it? But without revealing too much, I can tell you that there are a few definite Facts and a number of shadowy Possibilities floating around in the back of my mind, waiting for me to give them closer attention.

  What part of The Stone of Destiny is your favorite, and why?

  That would be hard to say, but a couple of parallel incidents come to mind immediately: Morgan’s initial encounter with Madame Medea, and Eny’s first meeting with Simon Brach. Each of these episodes attempts to depict an encounter with Unseen Realities breaking into our world in the form of visible, “normal,” everyday people and experiences—in the one case the Reality of Darkness, in the other the Reality of Light.

  What inspired you to write this story?

  In the first place, my admiration for all the great imaginative writers—George MacDonald, C. S. Lewis, J. R. R. Tolkien, and many others—who have so effectively used the vehicle of fantasy to lead readers into a new experience of timeless truth. We learn and grow by imitation, and my book represents my own feeble attempt to emulate the great masters. Second, I believe it was G. K. Chesterton who once said that a landscape is meaningless until it’s linked with a story. An inspiring place needs an inspiring tale. I wanted to create a narrative to go along with a couple of special locations that have always been deeply meaningful to me on a personal level.

  Morgan seems to do a lot of things wrong—that’s not typical of a book’s hero. Why did you choose Morgan for this journey?

  I guess the simple answer is that I didn’t “choose” Morgan. Morgan is simply myself under another name. Like everyone else, I do a lot of things wrong. Like everyone else, I need to understand how, by God’s grace and providence, all those wrong things can be taken up and woven together into a beautiful tapestry in which all things work together for good. In my opinion, the really good fictional heroes are always bunglers. It’s their journey from ignorance to understanding, from vice to virtue, from selfishness to sacrifice—the transformation they undergo as the story progresses—that makes a book powerful as well as interesting.

  You’ve written books about fantasy worlds—what was it like creating your own fantasy world? How did those nonfiction books inform your own world creation?

  It was far more difficult than I supposed. But in the midst of the ha
rd work I found myself on a journey that became an adventure in its own right—a trek along a road marked by twists, turns, and sudden drop-offs I never could have foreseen or predicted. In that sense, writing The Stone of Destiny was a lesson in letting go and allowing the creative process to have its own way. Did my nonfictional analyses of fantasy stories help me in this process? I suppose so—but only in the way that a very basic trail map aids a backpacker in the high country. It can give you a good idea of the direction in which you should be going, but it’s no substitute for actually being there.

  Pronunciation Guide

  For some of the more difficult names in

  The Stone of Destiny

  Badb—Bibe

  Baile—BAY-la or BAY-lee

  Beinn Meallain—Ben MEL-lane

  Crimthann—CREE-van

  Crucha—CROO-cha*

  Currach—CUR-rach*

  Danaan—duh-NAY-un

  Daoine—DEE-na;

  Daoine Sidhe—DEE-na SHEE

  Eba Eochaid—AY-ba YO-chid*

  Eire—AIR-ya

  Eithne—EN-ya

  Eny—EN-nee or like the word any

  Eochy—YO-chee*

  Fedelm—FAY-delm or FAY-del-um

  Feth fiada—Fay FEE-da

  Fionn MacCumhail—FINN mac-COOL

  Fomorian—Fo-MOR-ee-un

  Geis—gaysh

  Genann—Ge-NAWN

  Inisfail—IN-is-fall

  Lia Fail—LEE-a FALL

  Lugh—Loo

  Luimneach—LOOM-nyach*

  Macha—MAH-cha*

  Mag Adair—MAHG ah-DARE

  Morslogh—MOR-slow

  Muir Mor—MOOR MOR

  Niamh—Neev or NEE-uv

  Oisin—o-SHEEN or u-SHEEN

  Ollamh Folla—O-lav FOL-luh

  Rachra—RACH-ra*