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The Silver Vortex

a Mushroom eBooks sampler

Copyright © 1987, 2000, Moyra Caldecott

Moyra Caldecott has asserted her right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, to be identified as the Author of this work.

First published in United Kingdom in 1987 by Arrow Books Ltd.

This Edition published in 2004 by Mushroom eBooks,
an imprint of Mushroom Publishing,
Bath, BA1 4BX, United Kingdom
www.mushroom-ebooks.com

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced in any form or by any means without the prior written permission of the publisher.

This is a sampler of The Silver Vortex by Moyra Caldecott. If you enjoy reading these sample chapters and would like to read the rest, you can buy the complete Mushroom eBook edition from the usual bookshops online, or find more details at www.mushroom-ebooks.com.

Contents

For my family and friends
visible and invisible
with my love

Introduction

In this book we have to presuppose the reality of reincarnation, i.e. the continuance of life before and after death, and the reintroduction of the same ‘spiritual entity’ into the physical realm in different times and places, often for the purpose of working out some unresolved matter from a previous life. In the present day, a large proportion of the world’s population, mainly in the East but growing rapidly in the West, holds this belief. In ancient times the Celtic Druids certainly had faith in reincarnation; indeed, debts were often carried over from one life to the next, payment legally enforced. The Bronze Age people of this book, c. 1500-1450BC, lived long before the Iron Age Celtic Druids came to the British Isles... but the belief in reincarnation was probably already here, hinted at in ancient legends and expressed in the circle, the spiral and the vortex – their most frequent and insistent symbolic images.

In this book we also have to presuppose that the realm we see with our eyes and kick with our feet is only one of the many realms we inhabit. Invisible presences are everywhere – either emanating from ourselves, or belonging to other realms altogether – and as ‘real’ as anyone we might invite to dinner.

The Temple of the Sun at Haylken is called Avebury in modern times, and is still to be seen in Wiltshire, England. “The Haunted Mound” is now called Silbury Hill. Both monuments are thought to be nearly 5000 years old.

Chapter 1

Wardyke’s shadow

Urak caused the drum to be sounded deep into the night, her bony hands moving too fast for human sight as she beat the taut hide hour after hour in the oppressive and listening darkness.

The voice of the drum and the voice of its echo mingled and blurred, rumbling and growling until the sky answered. Only then did Urak lift her hands and give the high, thin call that would give the drum rest. When the lightning came it picked out her figure on the top of the mountain, arms wide and high, head tilted to the sky, counting with her heartbeats the pacing of the thunderclaps. Nearer the storm came, and nearer – until the thunder struck at the same time as the lightning.

‘Bring me a worthy acolyte...’ was the message the rising wind scattered among the mountains, hissed through the branches of the trees, hurled through the narrow ravines.

‘Give me a name... a face... someone to call... someone to teach... someone to carry on my work...’

The long cloak she wore flapped around her and cast giant shadows across the valley. For a moment it looked as though she would lift off and beat her wings into the storm.

‘I have been tormented by fools...’ she howled. ‘Send me someone who will learn quickly... who will understand...’

She was an old woman, her skin a mass of folds. The hair that swirled around her was as white as smoke, never cut since the moment of her birth. She had sent away a score of apprentices in her long life, never satisfied, never ready to share her deepest secrets with anyone she did not consider her equal. But who could ever equal her, mighty witch-woman of the mountains, seasoned sorceress of nearly a hundred summers? Lately she had felt time slipping away from her: she could hear death whispering behind her, and she knew she had trained no one fully to follow her.

She tried to hold the rain back for she knew that once the rain burst from the black cloud that pressed so heavily down on the brow of her mountain, the storm-power she needed to use would be defused. With her own will she forced the cloud to hold its burden.

Once again her voice rang out.

Once again the wind carried her message.

In the livid light before the next whip-crack of thunder, she thought she glimpsed another figure on the rock platform beside her.

Her thin body was shaking with the strain of calling the storm and holding it poised. There was almost unbearable pain in every limb – but she knew she must hold on.

The next flash confirmed that she was no longer alone.

A man was before her – his eyes, the eyes of the dead.

She closed her own eyes and saw him still, held as an afterimage, accurate in every detail.

‘Your name?’ she asked in the language of the dead.

‘Wardyke,’ he said, his voice crackling like dry kindling in fire. Wardyke! She knew the name from a time when he had been her apprentice... one who had pleased her more than most.

‘Wardyke,’ she hissed, and felt the first hard hammer-blow of the rain. ‘Give me a name! Give me someone worthy to train as my heir, someone who will succeed in destroying the Temple of the Sun where I have failed, someone who will make Guiron wish he had never been conceived in the womb of Time – let alone born to cross my path in this life...’

Wardyke smiled darkly. He too had been the victim of Guiron’s power as High Priest of the Temple of the Sun. It was Guiron who had refused him the final prestigious mark of initiation into the priesthood after his long and arduous training at the Temple. It was Guiron who had masterminded the forces that had defeated him on the field of battle. And before that – in another lifetime – there had been another wrong not yet paid for... Wardyke had a great deal of bitterness to share with this wild and fearsome woman of the mountains.

He smiled because he knew a way to avenge both Urak and himself that was so neat, so economical, so marvellously simple and cruel, that she could not help but be delighted with it. He would give her a name that rang in the heart of both Guiron and Kyra, his two most hated enemies. He would give her an heir that no one would suspect until it was too late: an heir that would destroy the Temple from within. Urak would not regret calling his shadow up from those dark regions in which it had lain festering for so long. She would be proud of her one-time pupil. She and he would achieve together what neither of them had been able to achieve alone.

‘Deva,’ he said, his eyes darker than a cavern that had never seen the light. ‘Deva, daughter of Kyra.’

Urak did not know the name Deva. She did not know the name Kyra. Her quarrel had been with Guiron and, before him, with other High Priests of the Temple of the Sun who had tried to prevent the spread of her power.

‘Who is this Deva?’ she called. ‘Who is this Kyra?’ But the pressure of the cloud above her was now too strong for her to hold back and she could feel her will giving way, her body crumpling. The image of Wardyke was fading, the echo of his words diminishing until finally it was drowned out by the thunderous beat of the raindrops on the rock as the cloud burst. On her knees in the deluge she still tried to reach him, tried to learn more about the name he had given her... but all she could hear now was the clamour of a million tiny chattering rain voices warning her that she might pay dearly for the name she had been given, that she should not accept it lightly...

* * * *

The slave who served Urak, Boggoron, found her in the morning, soaked through and shivering, gibbering a name he did not know. He carried her to her cave and saw that the hearth fire was banked up. The storm had passed and the mountains rang with the sound of water on rock, birds greeting the sunshine, a shepherd calling his sheep.

* * * *

The same dawn saw Deva, daughter of Kyra, many days’ journey to the east of Urak’s mountain fastness, stirring and waking beside her husband Gya. A thin beam of sunlight driving through a small gap in the curtain pricked her eyelids like a needle. She tossed her head impatiently and turned over, her back to the window. But the damage had been done. She was awake and the birds, uttering every variety of trill and pipe and warble, insisted that the day was already under way and she was missing it.

She turned back again to the young man still asleep beside her and pulled the rug aside so that she could see the firm and muscular landscape of his back. She kissed the nape of his neck and then worked her way down his arm, pausing to give his elbow a sharp bite. He woke with a jerk and slapped at the place she had bitten. She laughed and bit him on the hip. He heaved over on his back and took her roughly in his arms, shaking her and then kissing her. But now that he was awake and she had him roused, she suddenly lost interest and pulled away, slipping from the bed and taunting him by standing naked just out of his reach. She felt restless, as though she wanted something, but she didn’t know what. A short while ago it would have been Gya. Then she could not have enough of his loving. But now... She reached for her wrap and covered herself.

He stared at her intently for a few moments, and then turned his shoulder to her, his fists clenched. He knew her well enough not to insist on anything when she had that expression on her face. He was fully awake now, and angry. He was angry with her and angry with himself. He wished he was not bound so close to her: wished that he could live without her. He told himself a thousand times that he had not chosen her – she had chosen him. He had walked into this community, its wood and reed houses clustered in the valley of Haylken near the Temple of the Sun, a free bowman, the hero who had helped to overthrow the armies of Groth, honoured, admired, in a position to take any woman he wanted. He could see them now, the young girls, clustering around him, their eyes begging for the slightest crumb of his attention. But Deva had swept them all aside. With a flash of her jet-dark eyes and a swing of her long raven’s-wing hair she had led him firmly from the others and set him beside herself at the victory feast. He had been astonished at her beauty and her boldness, and awed by the splendour of her dress, the great clasp of amber and gold that held her light cloak to her creamy-white shoulder, the gold bracelets that gleamed on her slender arms. He remembered, as a drowning man remembers the last glimpse of dry land as he sinks beneath the surface of the water, the comfortable and rounded contours of Farla, a less frightening beauty, on the other side of the long table, before he succumbed completely to the spell of Deva, daughter of the High Priest Khu-ren and his wife Kyra, mighty Lords of the Sun, the most powerful and respected people in the land.

Deva was getting dressed. He could hear her moving about the room. What would she do so early in the morning? Today was probably market day. She would be out before anyone else, making sure she had first choice of all the goods the merchants brought in, all the food the farmers stacked in such neat piles. She needn’t have bothered – for everyone knew her and everyone loved her and she would be given the first chance to acquire anything worth having that came into the Haylken community this day. Sometimes he called her a magpie. She seemed to need to accumulate things. He had seen her so often, flushed and bright-eyed, bargaining for some length of cloth or basket of willow wands that he knew she didn’t need. Crowds would gather round her, enjoying the heated exchange between the young woman and the salty old merchant, egging her on as she lowered the value of the goods for barter. And then, when she had him cornered, she would suddenly lose interest and move on to the next one. He would have thought the merchants would hate her for the way she teased them, but they did not – and nor did he. They, like him, probably remembered the times when she gave in suddenly, capriciously, beautifully.

She leant down and kissed the top of his head just before she left the room and he heard her humming as she stepped lightly out into the early morning sunlight. ‘Next time,’ he thought, ‘next time I won’t let her get away with it.’ He drifted back to sleep, pleasantly imagining how he would make love to her the next time she woke him as she had this morning.

* * * *

Isar awoke troubled. For the first time in many years he had dreamed about his father – not Karne, who had brought him up with loving care, but his natural father, Wardyke, who had raped his mother Fern, and who had been killed in the war between the Spear-lords.

As soon as he opened his eyes the dream began to slip away, as an intruder would when the master of the house begins to stir. Isar lay on his back staring at the wooden beams above him and the thatch that kept the weather out. The grey light of early dawn had entered through the window he kept unshuttered in all but the worst weather. Lark, who lay beside him still wrapped in sleep, hated the dark and was comforted to see the stars from their bed. She was usually awake with the dawn like her namesake, but this day she lay curled up with her hand over her eyes as though she didn’t want to face the day.

Isar tried to remember what he had dreamed. The impression of Wardyke’s presence was strong, but he could recall none of the details. He wished Lark was awake. He felt the need to talk about Wardyke. Strange after all these years! He thought he had put him out of his life forever. He kissed the shoulders of his wife and held her close. She stirred and turned to him with a sleepy smile. Lark, the girl who had saved his life more than once during that dreadful conflict with Groth and his followers, her tongue cut out on Na-Groth’s orders, a stranger to the Haylken community, was yet as close to him now as his own heartbeat.

Drifting between sleep and waking, Lark caught the shadow in Isar’s eyes and touched his lips with her fingers. She couldn’t speak but she could communicate with her hands, her eyes and her thoughts, and she had taught Isar that tongue-talk is only a very small part of the human dialogue. But Isar needed to use word-sound this morning, he needed to push out into the open what he was feeling. He needed to rid himself of the strange, haunting mix of emotions he had always had regarding Wardyke... As he talked Lark listened quietly, fascinated – her intent grey-blue eyes never leaving her husband’s face, seeing how he wavered between the love and loyalty of the distant past and the revulsion Wardyke had generated more recently. She saw an image of the man, tall and lean, with dark and penetrating eyes, aquiline nose, sharp and determined chin. The image was so clear in her mind’s eye she wondered for a moment if he were really there, in the chamber, watching them. She shuddered and buried her face against Isar’s shoulder. She prayed that the old chain was well and truly broken and that Wardyke would never again return to interfere in Isar’s life. With Guiron far away, Wardyke dead and Deva apparently happily married to Gya, it had seemed as though Isar was free at last to live a new life – but now, she wondered...

* * * *

Kyra was already in the Temple when the first light came. She too had sensed the stirring of an old danger and was preparing to combat it in the most effective way she knew – by calling on the help of the spirit-realms, by gathering strength from her peers across the world and across time. Khu-ren, her husband and High Priest of the Temple, was not with her. He had celebrated the turn into spring with them – the moment when the sap begins to rise and the travelling birds return – and was now on a progress through the land, visiting other communities, encouraging and strengthening bonds with the mother Temple, and making a particular point of calling on those priests who were failing to keep up regular contact through the thought-channels.

Like a silver shadow she slipped over the wooden bridge that spanned the deep protective ditch round the huge circle of standing stones. She greeted the night watchman and he stood aside for her, smiling as all people smiled when the Lady Kyra passed by. Khu-ren, her Egyptian husband, was admired; but she was loved. Although she had a married daughter, her step was still as light and firm as a young girl’s, and her hair, standing out around her this early dawn, was still like a fiery cloak of spun gold.

‘Stay in peace,’ she said softly as she passed.

‘Go in peace,’ he replied. It was too early for the dawn ceremonies – but the Lady could go where she pleased.

The grass under her bare feet was cold, a touch of late spring frost sparkling like powdered crystal on the leaves and stalks. She hardly felt it, pleased to be treading directly on the earth.

She did not use the three tall stones at the centre of the inner northern ring, the most sacred and powerful place in the whole system of circles, but went directly to her favourite stone – one she always turned to when she had a personal problem. It was an outer stone of the northern ring, the one against which Khu-ren had stood in that long-gone time when she had first called the Lords of the Sun to her aid, when she had not yet seen him in the flesh but already knew from his spirit-form that she loved him.

She leaned her back against it, looking outwards to the mighty stones of the main circle and the ridge beyond them. She would have seen nothing of the landscape surrounding the Temple even if it had been light, for the ridge would have prevented that, but she could always see the sky. She tipped her head back so that her golden hair flowed over the stone. She watched the subtle and gradual adjustment of colour tones as the earth prepared to receive the Light-giver, the King of Kings. She knew the sun was only the visible cipher for the invisible God, the Nameless One, but the miracle of the rising never ceased to fill her with awe. The sky was lightening to the purple of iris and gentian. One by one the stars were disappearing until, in a pale green dome, one enormous diamond hung, the morning star, the herald of the day, with its entourage of birds.

* * * *

Her husband, Khu-ren, in a distant forest, waking on his bed of moss and dry fern, looked up through the high canopy of branches and saw, blazing through an intricate net of twigs and new leaves, the morning star. He looked into its eye and smiled, knowing that Kyra had found a way to be with him; and then he frowned, for the star was already gone, and a shadow had touched his heart. Was it a warning from Kyra about dangers he would have to face, or was it a call for help against dangers that she had to face? He started to compose himself for spirit-travel, preparing to join her in the Temple – where she must surely be in order to send out such a powerful beam of thought. Before he could leave his body, however, he was distracted by a sound from above and to the left. He turned his head to find that he was being closely watched by the huge and unblinking eyes of an owl.

Khu-ren felt strange – as though he were under some kind of spell, as though someone were deliberately suspending time, deliberately holding him back. He became totally absorbed in his observation of the owl. Every detail of feather and beak, of folded wing, of claw on twig, fascinated him. All the time the light was growing stronger and the creature clearer. Its eyes seemed to stare dispassionately into his innermost thoughts, and by doing so, seemed to blot them out one by one, until his mind was left a blank. He no longer remembered the message of the star, no longer remembered that he had been about to try to make contact with Kyra.

At last the owl moved, and was gone instantly, disappearing into the shadows as though it had never been. Khu-ren ran to the foot of the tree on which it had perched, but there was no sign of it – nor had he heard any sound of beating wings. If it had been an apparition, its ‘sending’ was not from the Temple. He had not missed the malevolence of its penetrating gaze. Hastily he gathered up his possessions, anxious to leave the place.

* * * *

In the great house of the Spear-lord, overlooking the sprawling community of the Temple of the Sun at Haylken, Kyra’s brother Karne half woke to find that his wife Fern was not beside him, and turned over to sleep his dreamless sleep. She often left when first light came. He knew if he looked for her he would find her in her garden. There were three children apart from Isar, and the only time she really had for herself was before they woke in the morning. Sometimes even that was taken away by their youngest, who woke with the birds, but this day, mercifully, he was lying with his thumb in his mouth, breathing steadily, when she crept past him. Karne was the Spear-lord of his village, the first of his people to have that privilege, and the Spear-lord’s lady had not only her own family to attend to, but a constant stream of supplicants and guests.

Fern loved the early morning. It was true the night gave one respite from the noise and bustle of the day, and the difficulties that seemed insoluble at sunset were often sorted out when the mind was still; but the darkness carried its own burdens, and nightmares could creep in below one’s guard. In the morning everything was fresh and new... all good things seemed possible.

She drew her woollen cloak closer over her night shift. It was still very cold, but she knew the sun was returning, and she could stand anything as long as the sun was on its way. Winter was not a good time for her. She hated the long dark when her companions, the plants and the trees, shut themselves down. For months she could have no communication with them. The wind howled through their bare branches with its own voice, not theirs, and she felt alone when she walked over the crackling brown bracken of the forest.

Now everything was stirring again. She could feel the movement inside her rowan tree when she rested her cheek against its bark. Every cell was vibrant with activity – the sap rising through the twigs, pushing out the leaf shoots and the tiny curled blossom buds. Everywhere the earth was cracking open as the green shouldered its way out of the dark towards the returning sun.

Every morning and evening at the same time three geese flew diagonally over her garden, uttering their strange raucous cries. She smiled as she heard them approaching now. Their regularity was comforting though she could never understand why they flew from one apparently identical pool of water to another a few miles away each day and returned to the first each night. Sometimes they dropped feathers for her as they passed. She had a collection of bird feathers in a little wooden box Isar had made for her, the lid beautifully carved with images of birds. She sometimes allowed her daughter Inde to look through them and choose some to play with. The best and largest ones she herself had woven into the slender golden ring she wore around her head sometimes on ceremonial occasions. Her long red-gold hair had a few strands of grey in it now, and she was not as slender as she had been as a young girl, but when her hair was piled on top of her head under the feather crown, and her best green cloak was caught at her shoulder with an amber and gold clasp, she did not look like the mother of four children, one of whom was already grown to manhood.

The geese passed but dropped no feathers this day. Fern went from plant to plant in her garden, tenderly freeing a shoot from the weight of a stone here, placing a stick for a tendril to grasp there. For some reason she began to think about Wardyke. Puzzled, she told herself it must be because she was paying such attention to the new growth coming through. It reminded her of the time her forest began to grow again after Wardyke had cruelly burned it down. She had hated Wardyke and he had raped her, but she no longer carried bitterness for this. Had not this evil brought about her handsome and much-loved son Isar? But she found it difficult to forgive the burning of her forest. She still woke sometimes in the night with tears streaming down her cheeks, unable to tell Karne what was troubling her. It seemed to her she could hear her green children screaming as the flames devoured their branches and tumbled the trunks that had taken so many centuries to grow. It was true a new forest had sprung up again from the charred remains of the old one – buckthorn and dogwood, hazel and alder and ash – but her mighty oaks and the yew trees that seemed to have been growing from before time began were gone, and in this life she would not see them grow to that size again.

‘Why do I remember this now?’ she thought angrily. ‘It’s a long time since I’ve had that dream.’ She shook her head, trying to shake away the memory. The light had been steadily strengthening since she left her bed, and the long rays of the sun were beginning to pick out the frost crystals on certain tall grass leaves so that they momentarily blazed with light and then dissolved. ‘I will not think of Wardyke,’ she told herself. ‘He has no place in our lives now.’ But her tryst with the dawn had been spoiled and for once she was not sorry when she heard the call of her second son, Jan.

Jan was a boy of eleven summers, restless and energetic, usually his father’s companion when he rode or strode about the valley, but not averse to working with his mother in the garden when there was nothing else to do. He came running down the path, ready for the day, impatient that no one else was up and about, chewing on a piece of yesterday’s loaf, a large apple from the last of the winter store in his hand.

Fern straightened up and smiled. Jan was good company – perhaps he would help her dig a trench for the new plantings. She sent him off in search of an antler pick she had put somewhere at the end of the summer and he left with a good grace, glad to have something to do. ‘How tall he is growing,’ she thought, ‘hardly a child any more.’ Inde, her daughter, was a year older, but shorter than he and very different in temperament – passive, steady, reliable but somewhat unimaginative. Jan was quicksilver – never still, never dull, alternately surprising them with his maturity and shocking them with his childishness. If anyone could drive the shadows out of her thoughts it would be Jan. She was glad he was up and about.

* * * *

Unaware of the shadow that was beginning to stalk the quiet community of the Temple of the Sun in the valley of Haylken, Guiron, now a very old man who, after years of wandering, had finally come to live beside the great Nile river in Egypt, went about his daily business. His friend Userhet, also a man long retired from active life, was teaching him to read the writing of his people.

When Guiron first exiled himself from his homeland, Britain, where he had been High Priest of the mighty Temple of the Sun for more years than he cared to count, he made sure that an ocean lay between him and those he loved and whom he felt he had betrayed. But the narrow ocean was not enough. On a clear day he could see a faint smudge of white on the horizon, the white cliffs of his birthland, and he found himself gazing at them, remembering the past with nostalgia, when he should have been seeking the future.

Sadly he gathered his new possessions together and set his face towards the north-east. There he found the climate harsher and the people less friendly. He told himself as he battled against wind and storm and driving sleet, as he was turned away from hearth after hearth, as he heard the wolves singing in the forests and the prey of the bald eagle screaming, that he deserved no more. He journeyed perpetually, seeking some sign, some sage who would teach him something he did not yet know, something that would help him overcome his own nature and free him from the guilt he still felt for what he had done.

In the long dark winter of the far north, where the sun hardly rose for half a year, he thought for a while he had at last found such a sage, such a teacher. The Mogüd, a wise-man, a shaman, holed up against the winter with his apprentice, his grandson, took him and gave him shelter in his rough hut of reed and hide, smoke blackened and stinking of dried fish. He had found Guiron on the verge of death, lost in a thick fog, shivering and frightened, his long years as High Priest forgotten. It was as though he was the first man, crawling on his hands and knees, faced by the primeval void. The Mogüd had lifted him up in his huge arms and carried him until they were on a slope above the fog and Guiron could see a blaze of stars. He wept like a child, knowing that he had forgotten the splendour of existence and had succumbed to unforgivable despair. It was the Mogüd who gradually gave him back himself.

Outside the tight little world of the shaman’s hut the wind howled and the snows piled up. The three of them lived on a sparse diet of dried meat and dried fish. Edible mosses and lichens gathered in the good weather were a welcome supplement. The two old men managed reasonably well, but the growing boy’s eyes grew wild and feverish as he became hungrier and hungrier.

Guiron watched the boy’s training with interest, the very frenzy of his hunger being used by the old man to prod him into states of trance. The shaman’s way was different in many instances from the way of the Temple of the Sun. When he told the Mogüd how differently they worked, the Mogüd said it was because they had a different end in mind. He said that the Lords of the Sun mastered the skills of earthly spirit-travel and could roam the world in search of their peers, but he aimed at leaving the earth altogether and flying to the celestial world of the gods above. Yet even among the shamans of his line there were different methods of working. There was the ‘ladder’ method, where one trained slowly and laboriously to climb step by step to the celestial regions; and there was the method of the eagle, where one flew instantly and directly to one’s goal. He was trying to train the boy to fly – for this was the way with which he was most familiar.

As the winter grew deeper and deeper, and there was no end to the howling of the wind and the darkness that pressed close around them, Guiron and the boy became more and more disorientated, more and more prone to shaking fits and morbid dreams. The Mogüd watched them carefully, eking out the food and water.

One day Guiron woke to find the Mogüd muttering incantations and preparing something in a small wooden bowl. He was taking a pinch of powder from one leather pouch, and a handful of herbs from another. Gradually he mixed together a great many different substances. Guiron watched closely. He could feel that this day was going to be different from the others and he wondered if it would bring him the wisdom and relief he sought. The firelight flickered on the shaman’s face – the contrast of light and deep shadow making an impassive mask of it. Guiron glanced across at the sleeping boy, his tousled hair catching the light but his face still in darkness, unaware that from today there would be no turning back for him.

The Mogüd completed his preparations and called his two students to his side. The old man and the young boy crawled out of their sleeping rugs and stretched, looking hungrily at the rough shelves that housed what food was still left so late in the winter. The shaman shook his head. Today they would not eat. Today he had something much more important for them to do. He produced two ragged cloaks of eagle feathers from a pile of dusty objects behind the food store and bade them put them on. With some distaste, Guiron pulled the half-rotted garment around himself. It scarcely covered his shoulders. But the boy’s face lit up when he saw what his grandfather held in his hands, and he eagerly reached out to take it. His was the longer cloak and he wore it proudly, smoothing out the feathers that were ruffled and out of place, adjusting it until it lay around him like folded wings.

Then the Mogüd took out two pipes and filled their bowls with the mixture he had been making. Solemnly he lit them and handed one to Guiron first and then one to the boy, indicating that they should smoke them. Guiron hesitated a moment, wondering what the shaman was up to, but the boy trustingly put the pipe stem in his mouth at once. Guiron met the Mogüd’s eyes and hesitated no longer. In accepting the Mogüd’s teaching Guiron had agreed to suspend his own judgement... a thing no teacher at the Temple of the Sun would ever have advised – or indeed allowed.

He drew heavily on the pipe and felt the warm smoke filling his lungs.

Satisfied that his students were in the mood to obey him, the Mogüd took out a drum and began to beat it. For a while Guiron squatted on the floor dreamily smoking his pipe, listening with detachment to the music the Mogüd was making. Then, gradually, it began to seem as though the beating of the drum was coming from inside him and he felt the urge to move with it, to express it, to dance...

Guiron and the boy danced round and round, faster and faster. Then it seemed to them that the giant form of the Mogüd stood over them and commanded them to fly, commanded them to overcome the pull of the earth and to fly... to fly above... beyond... to fly like the eagle.

The urge to fly, the belief that he could fly, was all that was left of Guiron’s consciousness. He spread his wings, his feathers ruffled in the dark wind and, straining muscle and sinew, he lifted at last to the air – and flew.

The agony of muscles that had never been used before was almost more than he could bear, but the Mogüd’s voice drove him on, and the passionate desire to fly like the eagle held him to his course. He banked, he turned... his eye as red as a dying sun saw the earth a thousand leagues below him – a blue pearl, luminous in the darkness that surrounded it.

‘Ai,’ his bird-voice called. ‘Ai... ai... ai-i-i...’

The stars, like a handful of diamonds flung into a shaft of sunlight, glittered for a moment and then disappeared. He was among the ‘gods’. He could see their forms: some huge and menacing, others slender and wraithlike, some bedecked in jewels and rich fabrics, some in simple robes of white, some with the shape of men, some alien and weird... All with masks.

Guiron was filled with terror. ‘If only I could see their faces,’ he thought. ‘If only I knew who they were. If only I could look into their eyes.’

His human frame could take no more. His wings failed him and he spiralled down and down through darkness and cold to fall with a sickening thud at the feet of the Mogüd.

After a long time he opened his eyes.

He was in the smoky hut of the shaman. Beside him lay the body of the boy, with the wizened form of his instructor crouched over him, rocking on his heels, keening.

The boy was dead.

Shaking and confused, Guiron rose and stood beside them, gazing down at the body of the boy, the shell, the pathetic little pile of flesh and bone still in the cloak of dead and lustreless feathers.

Guiron felt sick and sad. He turned away and crept into his sleeping rugs in the corner. He lay down with his face to the wall and pulled them over his head. He was weary, weary. He was no longer sure what was right and what was wrong. He had had great faith in the Mogüd – but now he wondered. He felt dissatisfied, as though he had been cheated in some way, as though his flight had been an illusion induced by smoking the pipe and not as he had always understood such flights should be – a reaching of the actual soul, the eternal Self, towards the higher realms. He had always believed that these higher realms were not literally above the stars, but out of Time and out of Space altogether – a question of quality rather than of position. No wonder the ‘gods’ he had seen had been masked – they were no more than figments of his own imagination performing the role he demanded of them, like actors in a play. He had not really wanted to see behind their masks, because, if he had, he would have known them for what they were. How he longed for some One he did not know, some One he could not know... the Nameless One beyond all self-deception and illusion.

The Mogüd had suggested that the Lords of the Sun were earth-bound, and Guiron admitted it was this earth-realm that concerned them most – but only because without an understanding of what they were here and now they could not adequately prepare for what they were to become. When they reached for the celestial realms they wanted to be sure they could distinguish what was real and what was not.

In the spring Guiron left the Mogüd, seeking the sun and a teaching that he could better trust. It was thus that he had come, at last, to Egypt.

Guiron’s admiration for Userhet knew no bounds. He was an adept of the highest order and a master of his country’s enormous and complex store of knowledge. Coming from a culture that wrote nothing down, but learned everything by direct transmission from teacher to pupil, Guiron was fascinated by this, to him, new way of learning. He begged Userhet to teach him how to decipher and to inscribe, hoping perhaps to find among these elaborate glyphs something that would lift him far beyond himself. Userhet, in turn, was interested to learn what he could from the traveller – for what had been certainty when he was young now seemed, in old age, not so simple, not so certain.

While Wardyke and Urak hatched their plans for vengeance against him in Britain, Guiron lived a pleasant life in Egypt, full of hope that he had finally put to rest the old and troublesome web in which he had once been caught.

Chapter 2

Isar and Deva

Urak dismissed Boggoron and prepared to make the search for Deva, daughter of Kyra. There was a flat, smooth slab of black stone just outside the entrance to her cave, very different from the grey limestone on the rest of the mountain, and this she swept carefully – using a small brush of eagle feathers tied with a wolf-skin thong. Then she polished the stone with a soft cloth of doeskin. When she was satisfied that it was spotless she arranged a circle of red jasper pebbles on it, smooth and river-worn. In the centre of this she marked a pentacle, using a piece of white chalkstone.

There was one more thing to do. From a thong around her neck she untied a flattened disc of flint with a hole in the middle. She laid it in the pentacle so that it formed a small circular holding plinth. Then she went to a niche in the darkest part of her cave and drew out a snakeskin pouch. From this she removed a sphere of dark, almost black, smoky quartz. She had shaped and polished it from a huge single crystal until it was a smooth black ball, a scrying stone with a mirror surface.

The sun was rising fast, shining through the branches of the tall trees that grew in the valley well below the witch-woman’s cave, their crowns on a level with her floor.

She arranged the black sphere with great care, edging it from side to side until she was satisfied that it was perfectly centred. Then she waited, squatting cross-legged beside it with her back to the cave, facing the forest and the sun. She was ready the instant the sun rose above the tree tops and blazed down on to her table of symbols and artefacts. As the sunlight reached the black sphere, it illuminated not only the surface but the depths as well. As Urak leant closer and peered into it, she seemed to catch a glimpse of a huge circular temple of standing stones surrounded by a deep ditch and a high ridge; by burial mounds; by encampments and settled villages. She knew at once that this was the Temple of the Sun at Haylken, the centre from which all the thousands of stone circles throughout the land drew their strength and to which all who wanted to be of the priesthood gravitated for training.

The vision was gone almost as soon as it came. The sun had climbed higher and the angle of its rays no longer focused the light in that particular way. But Urak had seen enough. She knew the place. She had been there as a child, taken by her parents to be offered for training – partly because her family were convinced that she was a natural candidate for the priesthood with her strong psychic abilities, and partly because she was such a headstrong and difficult child they did not know what else to do with her. They hoped the famous Temple discipline would tame her and give them and the rest of the family and their neighbours some respite from her increasingly sadistic tricks. But she had refused to stay. There was something about the Temple that made her uncomfortable.

She had passed all the tests the priests put her through and everything seemed settled, when suddenly she started to weep and stamp her feet, and demand that she be taken home. She could see the eyes of the High Priest now as though it were yesterday – looking into her own with that disconcerting, steady, penetrating gaze. He knew then why she could not stay and quietly told her disappointed and protesting parents to take her home. Before they left he drew her aside and made various secret signs and passes over her head. When she demanded to know what he was doing in her small piping child’s voice, he looked at her very gravely and murmured, more to himself than to her: ‘I have done what I can... but I fear you will one day prove to be too strong for us.’

At the time she had not taken much notice of the enigmatic words and, indeed, was so delighted to have won her battle to be going home that she had apparently forgotten them until this moment. Now, as they came back to her from some deep storage region in her mind, she took them as a sign that she would be successful in taking whatever or whomever she wanted from the Temple.

‘So, Deva, daughter of Kyra, you are at the Temple of the Sun. But your destiny does not lie there and there you will not stay.’

Urak replaced the precious black sphere in its pouch and returned it to the depths of her cave. The red jasper pebbles were placed in their own pouch of wolfskin beside it. The pentacle she rubbed out with spit and her index finger. The flint with the hole she returned to the thong around her neck.

She had located her heir. Now all that remained was for her to claim her and train her.

The sun was much higher now, shining down into the valley that lay at her feet. The sides of the gorge were steep, birch and hazel and mountain ash clinging to the silvery grey walls of rock, ferns and moss flowing from crevices where soil had gathered and retained some moisture on the surface. Most of the rainwater in these mountains disappeared down sinkholes and drained away in an elaborate series of underground rivers and waterfalls. Urak knew that her mountains were hollow. What looked like gigantic slabs and mounds of solid rock were mostly thin shells of limestone over vast underground passages and halls. Guiron, in banishing her to these mountains, was unwittingly giving her access to a labyrinth which served her both as a luxurious dwelling and a hideaway where no one would ever be able to find her.

* * * *

Isar was preparing for a journey. Kyra had expressed a wish for a very special wooden bowl in which to keep her precious collection of double-ended crystals, and Khu-ren had asked Isar, the Temple wood-carver, to make it for her as a surprise. Isar had looked through the seasoned wood he had in store and found that none of it was suitable. He remembered a huge old oak he had once seen in a forest some distance away, so old that half of it had been brought down in a storm, while the rest remained standing black and gnarled with age, but still putting out fresh green shoots in the spring. He was by no means sure that it would still be there for him, but it was so far off the beaten path he had hope that it would not have been spotted by any of the woodsmen. On the fallen part there was a huge oak burr that would do very well for Kyra’s bowl.

He set off along the ridgeway that led towards the north, soon striding past a place the locals called the ‘field of the grey gods’ – that strange and haunted field where his palace had once stood in a past life, long-gone, ancient days. He remembered a time in this present life when, as a child, he had been taken there by Wardyke and glimpsed for a moment something of the splendours of that distant past life of his. He remembered also how Kyra had come seeking him and angrily pulled him back to the present.

But the field was soon past and he forgot the shadows it contained as a skylark trilled above his head. The huge circular Temple of the Sun was no longer visible, nor the plumes of smoke from the long wooden buildings that surrounded it. Even the mysterious flat-topped hill beyond the Temple that some people thought was a haunted burial mound, but which he believed to be a holy mountain raised in the ancient days to be close to the moon, the sun and the stars – even that had finally disappeared from sight. Everywhere the soft flush of hawthorn blossom drifted like white mist over the green, while underfoot all manner of small flowers peered out – the tiny crocus and the violet, the tall speckled snake-head fritillary so sacred to the Temple, the primrose, the lover’s periwinkle. What had been bare fields a few weeks before were now emerald green as the barley and the wheat began to grow. The high ridge took him into the forests at last, but he still had a long way to go. Oak did not grow comfortably on the chalk and was not commonly found among these gentle white hills.

About midday he rested in the sunshine with his back against a tree. He was tired and soon dozed off. The sun had moved a long way and he was in the shade when he woke, startled, at the sound of someone approaching.

‘Deva!’ he called out in surprise. Kyra’s beautiful daughter was indeed standing in front of him, out of breath but smiling broadly. She was dressed in travelling clothes, close-fitting buckskin trousers under her thigh-length tunic, boots laced up to her knees and a short cape flung jauntily over her shoulder. Her long black hair was plaited and tied back so that her face was completely clear of it. Her jet-black eyes were sparkling.

‘Yes, Deva,’ she said cheerfully. ‘Not an apparition or a dream or a ghoul. Deva in flesh and blood!’ And she laughed as she held out her hands to him.

Delighted, he took them in his own and allowed himself to be pulled to his feet by her.

‘What are you doing here?’

She stood on her toes and kissed him lightly on his lips: a butterfly wing could not have administered a lighter touch. He squeezed her hands warmly and kissed her where her hair joined her forehead. For the moment, in the joy of seeing her so unexpectedly, he had forgotten that recently, on more than one occasion, he had intercepted a look from her that made him uneasy.

‘I’m going to Farla’s wedding at Hael,’ she said, naming a village not far from the very place where he hoped to find the oak burr. ‘I heard you were probably on this road and I hoped I’d catch up with you. I’ve been running most of the way!’

He grinned. ‘It would be good to have your company,’ he said lightly. ‘But we’d better get on if we want to reach Hael before nightfall.’

But Deva was hungry and thirsty and they stayed a while longer for her to eat some of Lark’s freshly baked bread and drink from his water-skin. She had left in such haste she had not brought any provisions for herself.

Isar cast an anxious look at the sky. It was later than he wished and a billowing mass of clouds was piling up on the horizon.

‘If we don’t start soon we’ll be caught in that storm,’ he said. But she insisted that she was still tired and needed more rest.

‘Those clouds will take a long time to reach us,’ she protested.

But a wind had sprung up and they were moving with alarming speed across the sky.

‘Come,’ he insisted, and held out his hand to help her to her feet. It had been pleasant for a time to sit at the roadside talking of this and that, but he was beginning to feel impatient to be on the way again.

As he pulled her up, she stumbled slightly and fell against him. There it was again – the look in her eyes that should not have been in any woman’s eyes for a man not her husband. He moved away quickly and started to stride forward. She followed, two steps to his one, complaining that he was walking too fast. He did not slacken his pace.

It was not long before the clouds completely covered the sun, and they were nowhere near Hael when the rainstorm broke.

The distant landscape disappeared under a heavy veil of grey and the wind roared and rattled in the forests, rubbing and beating the branches of the trees together. Isar looked back at Deva and saw that she was almost being knocked off her feet by the fierceness of the gusts. He raced back to her and took her arm. Everything loose seemed to be whirling around them and everything rooted was being tugged and shaken. Then the first drops of rain fell, heavy and fast.

‘We’d better take shelter,’ Isar shouted against the wind and she nodded. The road here was wide and exposed, a ridge above the forest to the left and the open country to the right. They were already almost soaked through. He looked desperately around, but there was nowhere to go except down into the forested valley and hope that they could get below the wind and under trees clustered thickly enough to keep off most of the rain.

They slipped and slithered over the deep matting of wet dead leaves and down a steep slope, hand in hand. The spring growth was not as thick as they would have liked and most of the trees afforded very little shelter. The noise of the gale in the branches and the increasing orchestra of sounds in the valley as the stream swelled, rushing and gurgling over the rocks, put them into something of a panic. What if a tree blew down? They had both seen trees uprooted by gales, huge branches snapped like thin twigs.

‘There!’ shouted Deva suddenly, and pointed to a place where there was an overhang – a cliff that leaned over a turbulent stream and a ledge halfway up and out of reach of its fury. They edged their way over a crumbling scree to reach it, clinging to saplings, not letting one go before they had another in their grasp. At one time Deva lost her grip and her footing and slid some way before the huge old stump of a tree halted her. The black leaves on the forest floor were dangerously slippery now and it was some time before, bedraggled and scratched and out of breath, she reached Isar’s side again, and they were both comparatively safe and dry on the ledge.

She was shivering and he put his arm around her as they sat close together, watching the rain pouring into the forest, listening to the wind howling and shrieking in the high canopy above them.

They looked into each other’s eyes and laughed, exhilarated and happy that they had outwitted the onslaught of the elements. Isar kissed her wet cheek with a grin, and hugged her. The innocence of their childhood love had returned and for the moment Isar was no more than the cousin the much younger Deva adored. The far-memory of the more complicated adult love, and the life they had shared centuries before which had ended so disastrously, was dormant, sleeping below the surface, biding its time.

They had thought they would only have to shelter under the overhang for a short while, but the rain showed no sign of abating. After a while the wind eased off, but there was no break in the steady drum of the raindrops.

Isar unrolled his woollen cloak and wrapped it around both of them. Deva nestled into his shoulder.

He half expected her to say, as she had so often done as a child, ‘Tell me a story, Ia... the one about the revenge of the wolf-princess.’ This was one of her favourites – largely, he thought, because he had to accompany it with suitable howling and snarling.

She must have remembered those days too, for she looked sideways up at him now and there was a mischievous twinkle in her eye.

‘Tell me a story, Ia,’ she said.

‘The wolf-princess?’ he asked: but she shook her head and laughed.

‘No – that’s a child’s tale. Tell me the one about the storm that opened up a hole in the earth and those who fell through were not heard of again for a thousand years.’

He smiled, telling the old tale... the sadness of those who had lost their families and lovers... the passing of time on the surface of the earth so that generations lived and died, while for those who had fallen into the hole and now lived in a magical land more beautiful than any words could tell, hardly any time passed, at all.

Deva listened with delight to the descriptions of the splendours in the other world – the crystal towers, the shimmering forests, the lakes so clear that the diamond sands beneath them shone night and day and boats sailing on the surface of the water cast no shadows, for the light was coming as much from below as from above. But when he reached the part where the earth opened up again and the lost people emerged excitedly to look for their loved ones and found that the world had changed beyond belief and no one was there who could recognise them, tears gathered in her eyes and she gave a sob.

Isar held her close, suddenly realising why Deva had always loved this tale. Had she not waited as ghost-lady of the lake beside the Haunted Mound for centuries for his return... and when he had at last returned, nothing was as she had hoped.

Forgetting everything but the passion of that ancient life, he gathered her even closer and kissed her deeply. Had they been wrong to try to break the thread, change the pattern? Were they not destined? He felt her response to his kiss. She was winding herself around him like a vine. His heart was hammering painfully, and from being so cold he was burning hot. How he desired her at that moment! But consummation was not possible on that tiny, crumbling ledge, and discomfort broke them apart. Trembling, he drew himself up and away from her, and found that the rain had ceased and the night was coming on rapidly.

‘Deva,’ he said sharply. ‘We must go.’

She looked at him, dazed, puzzled – and then with extraordinary bitterness. She picked up a loose stone and hurled it with all her strength away from her. It hit the trunk of a tree and ricocheted against two more before it fell with a thud to the valley floor. To her it seemed he was calmly folding his cloak and preparing to leave. Because his back was to her she could not see that his hands were shaking so much he could scarcely make the folds.

* * * *

Isar’s wife, Lark, had something to tell his mother, Fern. For some time she had suspected that she was pregnant and now she was sure. Her body was gradually changing. She could feel the subtle adjustments it was making. A new soul was nesting in her and she had to prepare for the physical nurturing of it until it was ready to take its own place in the world. She had held off telling Isar because twice before she had conceived and had had a miscarriage, and this time she did not want to raise his hopes until she was sure the soul would stay. She had been on the verge of telling him before he left to fetch the oak burr, but his long and anxious talk about Wardyke had put a thought into her head that she wanted to examine before she told him anything. Fern was the one to tell. Fern, the mother of Isar. Fern, who had known Wardyke.

Lark had long since accepted the inconvenience of not being able to use word-sound. The people she loved had all grown accustomed to interpreting her hand language. But today for the first time in a long time she wished desperately that she could speak. She wanted to talk, to pour out, to relieve the pressure on her mind with floods of sound as other people did. With her kind of talking one had to say exactly what one wanted to say and no more.

Fern was at home and greeted Lark warmly. She loved her eldest son’s wife and was always delighted to see her. They walked out into the garden together, the older woman’s arm around the girl’s waist. Knowing that Lark could not talk, Fern did what most people did, talked a lot herself. She chattered on about this child and that, about this plant and that, about her husband, Karne, who had gone off with his two eldest children, Inde and Jan, to look for the plants Fern needed for the water garden she was preparing. They were standing beside the wall of heavy boulders he had built to dam the stream at the bottom of their garden, when Fern finally realised that Lark had not just come to pass the time of day but had something important she wanted to say.

‘What is it?’ she asked, looking at the girl’s hands and not her mouth.

Lark hesitated. How to begin? How to express the complicated and probably unfounded fears she had? How to ask the question she feared to ask?

But first she had good news for Fern. That would be easy to tell. She placed her hands on her womb and smiled. Instantly Fern hugged her.

‘You’re sure?’

Lark nodded vigorously. Fern knew the history of Lark’s miscarriages and put them down to the horrors of the time when Lark had been Na-Groth’s prisoner, the slave of his formidable queen. ‘There must be shadows in Lark’s heart that will take years to dispel,’ Fern had told Isar after the second disappointment. ‘Give her time.’ By the look on the girl’s face now, the shadows were lifting at last. Or were they? Fern caught something under the surface of Lark’s smile that told her there was something more Lark wanted to communicate and that it was not as good as the first piece of news.

She suggested they sat down, and Lark gladly complied. They sat facing each other on two of the larger boulders, and Fern composed herself into the mood of relaxed quiet that would make it easier to understand what could not be said in words. She watched Lark attentively. She saw that she was worried, that she was worried about her child. Was it because of the previous miscarriages? No. Did she feel ill? No. Did she not want the child? Lark’s response left Fern in no doubt that Lark wanted to bear her child, but – and here Fern came up against that hint of shadow again. Could it be that it might not be Isar’s child? She remembered the agony of the time when she herself discovered that she was carrying Wardyke’s seed. The quick and reproachful look she received through Lark’s tears told her that this was not the problem.

What then? Perhaps she had been given some sign about the child’s former lives. She asked if this was the case and knew from Lark’s reply that she was now very close to an understanding.

Because the question of Wardyke had scarcely come up since Lark had joined their community, no hand-sign had been devised for his name. Now, in desperation, Lark mimed again and again the two words ‘war’ and ‘dyke’ until Fern suddenly grasped what she was saying.

She went cold. Wardyke! Fern remembered how he had been in her own mind recently and how she had felt the stirring of the old malevolence.

‘What about Wardyke?’ she cried.

Laboriously Lark communicated in her own way that Isar had been suddenly troubled by memories of Wardyke one morning – and that she herself, since the time he had mentioned it to her, had been having a series of recurring dreams in which Wardyke featured. She would be walking down a path, and in each dream the path was different, but on each path her way was finally blocked by a tall dark figure in a long black cloak. She never saw his face – but she knew it was Wardyke. He never spoke to her. As soon as she saw him her terror was so great she turned round and ran back down the path. Every morning she had the dream she woke up out of breath, as though she had indeed been running.

Fern frowned. This was not good.

‘Perhaps,’ she said tentatively, though she had very little hope that what she was about to say was true, ‘it is not a message dream at all – but just one of those one has when one is worried about something. You say you have only had it since Isar spoke to you about Wardyke?’

Lark shook her head. ‘I had it the night Isar began to think about Wardyke... before he spoke to me about it!’

Lark remembered that she had encountered the dark cloaked figure in her dream that very night. She had not known then that it was Wardyke, and, in that first dream, she hadn’t turned to run, but stood her ground on the path gazing at the figure, ill at ease, but not yet in real fear. Isar had woken her before either of them made their next move. She had forgotten the dream entirely until it began to recur and she associated the figure with Wardyke. That she had first seen the figure in her dream before Isar spoke about Wardyke worried Fern.

‘Perhaps...’ she said, wishing wise Kyra was with her to give advice, or even Karne with his down-to-earth common sense. ‘Perhaps,’ she said, ‘if it occurs again... I mean, if – if you meet the figure again, you shouldn’t run but challenge him to show himself and say what he has to say. Perhaps you could even tell him to go and leave you alone.’

‘I fear,’ Lark indicated, her grey eyes swimming in tears. ‘I fear – this child...’ She put her hands on her womb and her face was so wracked with suffering Fern put her arms around her and held her close. So Lark feared that Wardyke might be returning through the gate of her body, his dark soul insinuating himself into their lives, his shadow lying between them.

Fern held her even closer. She wished she could say no, this was not happening; no, this was not possible; but she had felt his cold shadow on her heart and, it seemed, she had felt it the very morning Lark first dreamed her dream and Isar poured out his memories.

The two women clung together and neither could give the other comfort.

Fern’s garden grew silently and imperceptibly around them. A bud started to open. A leaf unfurled.

At last Fern pulled herself together.

‘Come, dry your eyes,’ she said, pushing the girl gently away from her. ‘We must be sensible. We must be practical.’

Lark’s eyes asked a great many questions. Fern was thinking rapidly.

‘We must ask Kyra. She’ll be able to probe into the other realms and find out for us.’

Lark’s face cleared. Of course, Kyra – the great priestess, capable of travelling through time and space and through all the realms available to humankind outside time and space. She would know. But then Lark’s heart sank again. If she knew for sure that it was so – what would she do? She shivered. Would she terminate the life in her womb? The life she had longed for – her child? She dreaded and feared to make such a decision. But if she let it live – what evil would it wreak? And if she did not – who was she to decide who should live and who should die? Who was she to deny Wardyke a chance for life and, with life, a chance to change?

Fern witnessed her turmoil.

‘I’ll speak to Kyra,’ she said reassuringly.

Lark shook her head.

‘No?’

‘No.’

She made Fern promise to say nothing to anyone. She wanted to think about this by herself. She wanted to be sure that she was ready for whatever Kyra might find out when the moment came, and she even decided not to tell Isar anything until she was surer in her own mind what she wanted to do.

Chapter 3

Urak locates her heir

The village of Hael was preparing a wedding feast. One of their most popular young farmers, Geb, was marrying the young woman he had been in love with all his life – Farla, daughter of By-ek, the chief Elder of the village. Geb had waited a long time for her consent. He had asked her first when they were young children and regularly every year at the spring festival since then. But, although she was fond of him, she had made it clear she was not in love with him and would prefer their friendship to remain as it was.

When she was fourteen she had chosen to leave Hael for the Temple of the Sun, to train as priest. At first her enthusiasm and dedication had been unshakeable. She had no doubt that she was destined to be one of the Lords of the Sun, the highest of the ranks possible for the priesthood. At that time the High Priest Khu-ren and his wife Kyra were the only initiates of this level at the Temple, but so quickly did Farla learn what her mentors set before her, and so single-minded was she in the pursuit of the difficult and arcane knowledge of the Temple, that Kyra herself recommended her for the special training. She was a good way through this when she began to lose self-confidence, and one year when Geb asked her to leave the Temple and marry him she actually considered it.

In the end she refused him as usual, but she watched him leave this time with something like regret – appreciating for the first time the steadiness of his stride, the comforting strength of his thick-set shoulders. The very earthiness that had irritated her before, now began to be appealing.

What she was trying to do was so difficult, so complex, so subtle. If she had tried to explain to him that when she was sitting silently, rock still, apparently doing nothing, she was in fact travelling the universe, exploring invisible and intangible realms unknown to him, learning from guides and teachers he did not even believe existed, he would not have understood. She was always surprised that he was so persistent; they had nothing in common. They were, literally, worlds apart. She could only surmise that he saw her always as the attractive, good-humoured village girl she had once been and never grasped at all that there was a whole other side to her nature – a side which was rapidly being developed at the expense of the one he knew.

When she was very tired and failed for the fourth or fifth time to achieve the state of consciousness that her teacher was expecting of her, she thought of Geb and longed to be the girl he thought she was. ‘How easy,’ she sighed, ‘to fall back into the village ways and have nothing to worry about but the earth-realm.’ But then, almost immediately, she remembered how unsatisfactory that realm could be – how limiting it could seem once one had experienced life enhanced by an awareness of the rich and various invisible and transcendent realms. She put Geb aside and concentrated once again on her training.

One day a young girl came to the Temple. She was lonely and anxious and Farla took her under her wing, remembering how she had felt those first few months away from home. Iren, the new student, was quick to learn and progressed admirably – but on the way she developed a passionate admiration for Farla which Farla at first enjoyed, but later began to find disconcerting. She could do no wrong in Iren’s eyes. Farla was to Iren a great spiritual being whose every word and every move ought to be emulated. It was the disparity between who Iren thought she was and her own feelings of inadequacy that finally drove Farla into the arms of Geb.

Walking the muddy track now, driving geese before her for the wedding feast, Farla thought back to the day she had made the decision to settle for what Geb had to offer and reject the vast potential of her life at the Temple. It had not been a sudden change of heart – though to her friends it appeared so. She had been finding the strain of living up to Iren’s vision of her, and Kyra’s expectations of her, more and more irksome.

She had found her mind wandering far too much when she should have been concentrating. In her work this could often be dangerous. Time and again Kyra impressed on her that the difficult skill of travelling in other realms was not sought to satisfy idle curiosity – and to forget one’s original purpose while undertaking it was to ask for trouble.

‘We seek to become familiar with the invisible realms only so that we can use the knowledge gained there to help us in this realm,’ Kyra said. An analogy she gave was of a small child who sees around her a certain horizon and bases all her decisions on what she can see within that horizon. The adult, taller than the child, can see further. But the priest, who can travel above the earth-plane, can see further still, so his or her decisions are based on a much wider understanding of what actually is the reality.

‘And yet,’ Kyra warned her more than once, ‘don’t think you know everything just because you know more than those who are outside the Temple. You are still only capable of seeing part of what there is to see – and for this reason it is imperative that you have integrity of motive. If your motive is true and good, there will be little danger that you will go far astray. But’ – and she never ceased to stress this – ‘if you lose quality of intention, you will lose quality of result.’

One day this lesson was driven home to Farla in a way that plunged her into despair and finally decided her to leave the Temple.

A young child who seemed to be dying had been brought to her. Iren had persuaded his parents to come to Farla because she believed implicitly that Farla was capable of producing great healing energy. Farla certainly had on occasions proved herself a very sensitive and effective healer. But this day she could not reach the right state of consciousness to channel the necessary healing energies. Gya, Deva’s handsome, flirtatious husband, had crossed her path the evening before and left her in no doubt that he would like to take her to bed. She had rejected his advances immediately and sharply, but she had lain awake all night thinking about him and dreaming of how it would be if she had accepted. Now, she knew, she should send the boy and his parents to another healer – but she accepted him, flattered by Iren’s total faith in her, and the parents’ trusting and beseeching eyes. She started the process of going into the Silence, her hands resting lightly on the child laid out on the couch before her. Iren stood opposite her, her eyes filled with admiration. How she longed to be as advanced and as skilled as Farla! The parents sat to one side, holding hands, waiting confidently for the miracle they were sure Farla would perform.

It was then Farla began to have doubts about herself. The Silence did not come as easily as she had known it in the past. When Kyra first trained her for this she had said that there were no words to express the feeling you had when you entered the Silence. There were no guidelines, no maps, no explanations. You would just know when you were there. And, after many puzzled and abortive attempts, Farla had known when she was there. Gradually it had become easier for her to reach that state, so that now there should have been no problem. But there was a problem. Like a lamp-flame that flickers in the wind, some moments she felt herself filled with energy from the spirit realms and ready to work on the child, but the next moment it was as though she was alone in a dark and empty place. She began to be afraid. What if she did not succeed? What if Iren saw that she was not as wonderful as she had thought? In bitter shame she knew she would not succeed – because she was thinking more of herself than of the child.

The child died.

Farla looked at the faces of his parents and at the face of Iren, and walked away. She could not think of words to say to comfort them. She had let them down.

The next day she left the Temple and returned to Hael.

* * * *

Isar and Deva did not reach the village of Hael until late evening. It was already dark when they turned off the road and took the track down to the village. The dogs were out to warn them off at once and, for the first time since they had left the shelter of the ledge, Isar and Deva came close together. They huddled back to back as the dogs ringed them, barking. Isar called out soothing words but both had their carrying pouches off their shoulders ready to use as weapons of defence if necessary. To their relief a man’s voice called out a sharp command and the dogs retired a short way, growling, still watching the intruders suspiciously. Then they were surrounded by men with torches demanding who they were and what their business was. Deva took Isar’s hand and Isar was glad of it. The flickering of the torchlight and the hostile, wary figures looming so suddenly out of the dark had startled them – though they were relieved that the dogs had been called off. It was Deva who rallied first.

‘Deva, daughter of the High Priest of the Temple of the Sun,’ she said haughtily, stepping forward. ‘And Isar, son of Spear-lord Karne. Is this the way Hael greets guests invited to the wedding of Farla and Geb?’

‘Guests are not expected to arrive so late at night,’ was the surly reply, though the man who gave it – the one who had originally challenged them – modified his tone.

Another stepped forward from behind him and held out his hands in welcome.

‘Greetings, Deva, daughter of the Lord Khu-ren and the Lady Kyra. Greetings, Isar, son of Karne. You are welcome. You must forgive us for our caution, but there are sometimes human wolves who roam the forests at night and prey on sleeping villages. I am By-ek, Elder of Hael, father of the bride.’

‘Greetings, By-ek,’ Deva said coldly. She had been frightened by the dogs and resented that she had shown it. But the warmth of the welcome that overwhelmed them as soon as it was known who they were soon made her smile. They were escorted to the village centre excitedly: those who were asleep were woken and a huge fire was lit. Isar stood back and watched, amused, as the whole village began to revolve around Deva. It was as though no one else existed. Kyra’s beautiful daughter had stolen all hearts. He had seen this happen many times before. Since she was a very small child she had had this power to attract and hold – to centre everything on herself. Isar was sure that there was not a person present who was aware of anyone else. Only he – because he knew her so well – could stand aside to watch. But even he – when she suddenly turned and sought out his eyes and laughed and waved at him – could not restrain the leap his heart gave. Did he still love her? ‘No,’ his mind answered. ‘She is selfish, fickle, sometimes even cruel.’ He knew he was better off with Lark, who created a peaceful environment for him where he could think his own thoughts and be his own self. But...

Annoyed with himself, he turned away and moved further from the fire, deeper into the shadows. There he encountered a young woman standing as quietly as he.

‘Farla?’ he enquired. He had seen her at the Temple during the time she was a novice, but had never taken much notice of her. She was a well-rounded young woman, though not plump. There was a scattering of freckles across her nose and cheeks and her hazel eyes were quick to sparkle. Her hair was brown, tinged with ginger and golden lights. She was not beautiful in the way that Deva was, but she was very pleasant to look upon and when she smiled she became beautiful. Her expression was now troubled. It was for her wedding Deva had come and she should have been beside her at the centre of the celebration.

‘What is it?’ he asked her gently.

Farla looked at him. She remembered him: the wood-carver. A slender young man with red-gold hair like his mother, eyes always dreamy as though he was not seeing what actually was there before him, but always what he as an artist could make of it. She remembered his wife, the dumb girl with the large, expressive eyes. Isar and she had always looked so close – so absolutely as though they belonged together. She had envied them their certainty. If only she could be as sure about her life! She had left the Temple which she loved, and a life that had meant a great deal to her, to live as a bird with its wings clipped, with Geb, but she was still unsure if she had made the right decision.

Kyra’s words when she told her she was leaving still haunted her. ‘Everyone approaching the final steps of initiation feels inadequate and wants to run away.’ Had she been too precipitate? Kyra made her feel that even the child’s death might not necessarily have been her fault. She pointed at the complexity and mystery of the healing process, the crucial timing of it, the readiness of the patient to be healed, the subtle karmic roots of the illness, many of which might be beyond the skill of the healer to uncover. Perhaps the illness had gone too far. Perhaps the child himself was blocking the flow of energy by his doubts. Or his parents’ anxiety might have set up such a field of negative vibration around the child it was impossible for the healing energies to get through.

Farla listened, but she knew in her heart that even if the child’s death had been inevitable whatever she might have done, she had still failed to go into the Silence properly and she had still failed by allowing her own little earthly self to intrude in a matter that should have been dealt with by her higher self.

She had worked hard to fit back into the ordinary world since she returned to the village, and hoped she had finally done so – but Isar brought back vividly the flavour of the Temple, of a place that had no bounds, of a place that was in touch with the whole world and the furthest reaches of the universe... and she had become unsettled all over again. Her questing heart and upreaching soul would not be still. She was lost between two worlds and feared that she belonged nowhere. Besides, on another level altogether, the sight of Isar and Deva together brought back the longing she undoubtedly felt for Gya. She saw the way Deva looked at Isar, and she resented that she had rejected a night with Gya which she would very much have enjoyed, because she was trying to honour their marriage; a marriage which now seemed not to matter that much to Deva.

She sighed and Isar asked her once again what the matter was.

‘Nothing,’ she replied.

‘Ah – but sometimes “nothing” hurts more than “something”,’ he said wryly.

Instantly her eyes filled with tears. She wondered if she could talk to Isar. She felt he would understand. He was of the Temple and yet not of it. He respected it and abided by its teaching, but had taken no vows. But she was prevented from saying anything further by the arrival of Geb, who, momentarily recovering from Deva’s spell, had noticed that his bride was not with the circle in the firelight.

Farla turned away at once so that he would not see her tears and Isar distracted his attention by asking him if he had any idea when the village intended settling down for the night.

Geb laughed. ‘We’re usually asleep long before this,’ he said. ‘But we don’t often have a visit from the High Priest’s daughter.’

‘The High Priest’s daughter has been travelling all day,’ Isar pointed out. ‘And I’m sure she would be very grateful for a chance to rest.’

Farla had recovered and slipped her hand through Geb’s arm.

‘Come,’ she said. ‘We’ll go and see what we can do.’

Isar watched them go, and wondered what the problem he had seen in Farla’s eyes, was.

At last the village settled down and Deva and Isar were shown places to sleep in Farla’s family home. Deva and Farla lay side by side in one bed, with Isar beside them on the floor. The parents had wanted to give up their bed for Deva, but she refused the offer and they had settled for this arrangement.

Isar lay awake for a long time, wrapped in his cloak, staring into the darkness, hearing the whispering and the creaking of the wooden bed as the two young women tried to get comfortable before finally dropping off to sleep. Deva had insisted that she would travel on with him in the morning to find the oak burr. It was a day or two before the wedding and she said they would be back in good time for the celebrations. From the way she put it, Isar could tell she was counting on his staying for the wedding. He began to feel that their meeting on the road had not been a chance encounter at all but had been very carefully contrived. Well, if it was, she would not get her way. He was going on alone and he was returning to the Temple by a different route – alone.

He must have dropped off to sleep at last, because he woke with a start and for a moment was completely disorientated. He reached out for Lark beside him and felt a cold, hard, alien floor. He turned his head to where he would normally see the stars and met a darkness so black it seemed solid. His heart pounded with alarm. There were sounds of snoring and breathing in the room that should not have been there. And then, in relief, he remembered where he was.

He shut his eyes again and set about adjusting his mind more gradually to his situation. When he opened them he was feeling quite calm and collected. He knew exactly where and what everything was in the room although he could not see it. The sagging bed of wood and hide strips that contained the bulky figures of Farla’s parents was off to the left and Farla’s siblings were lying in a huddled and untidy heap on the other side of the central hearth, the two eldest after Farla having been banished there for the night to make way for Deva. Beside him was the other bed, the one with Deva and Farla. He turned his head towards it, wondering if Deva was asleep, and saw something that made him gasp. At the foot of the bed were two figures. It took a moment for him to realise that they were unlike any he had seen in the village and indeed unlike any he had ever seen. They were contained in an eerie glow that illuminated them completely without throwing any light on to the rest of the room. One was a very old woman, so old that Isar would have expected her to be bent double, but instead she was standing tall and straight, thin, wizened, but as strong as a warrior. Her white hair flowed round her like a cloak almost to the ground. On her head she wore a close-fitting cap of feathers, and when he looked more carefully he saw the eyes of an owl staring at him from her forehead. The cap was in fact made of the skin of an owl – feathers, eyes, beak, ears still intact. Her own eyes below the owl’s were directed at the figure of Deva on the bed.

As Isar watched, the old woman raised her right hand and silently pointed a long, thin finger at Deva. Every finger on her hand was adorned with a different ring, the huge stones glinting in the uncanny light. Beside her, her companion leaned forward to get a better view of Deva, whose arm was flung out across Farla, her long lashes dark against her fair cheek. Only afterwards Isar questioned how he could see so much detail in pitch darkness. The old woman’s companion was a small man as hunched and twisted as she was straight – of middle years, Isar thought, and clad in outlandish clothes, the skins of wild cat strung together to make some kind of haphazard cover for his ungainly naked body.

Isar found he was watching the scene – after the initial shock – as though there was nothing unusual about it. And then suddenly the two figures disappeared and the room was totally black again.

He sat up hastily and peered at the place where he knew the door to be. It was impossible for the visitors to have moved so swiftly across the room that they could have opened and shut it again without his hearing or seeing it. It was a crude kind of shutter and had to be lifted into place each night. He had to accept that this had been a supernatural visitation. He began to shake and he pulled his cloak closely around himself. Who? Why? Their attention had specifically been directed at Deva. Should he tell her? It might frighten her. She was being singled out – pointed out. Who by? To whom? For what purpose? His heart was hammering. He could still see the figures in his mind’s eye so vividly he could almost believe they were still there. Perhaps he had not seen them at all? Perhaps he had still been asleep and they were only part of his dream? He lay down again and tried to compose himself and think clearly and sensibly. Was it a dream?

He knew it was not.

As the night slowly wheeled away and the grey light of dawn came through the cracks around the window and door shutters, he knew that after seeing what he had seen he could not leave Deva alone. He would keep her by his side until their return to the Temple. He would not tell her what he had witnessed – but he would tell her parents as soon as they arrived back. Kyra and Khu-ren would know what to do.

* * * *

The branches hung low as Isar and Deva penetrated deeper and deeper into the forest away from the well-travelled paths. Even hunters and woods-men seldom came this way. Everywhere the fern was beginning to push out tightly coiled stems, holding the young fronds close and clenched until ready to release them. The trees shimmered with a pale and silky green light.

Deva had been astonished how quickly Isar agreed to take her with him. The evening before, she had been sure that he would refuse. But this morning at her first suggestion he had instantly accepted, and since they left the road he had been extraordinarily solicitous and protective. He held branches for her. He lifted her over marshy ground, though he knew perfectly well she was as capable as he of leaping over it. She wondered if finally he was beginning to desire her as much as she desired him – and she was almost frightened by the thought. She had never been quite sure why she had decided so firmly that they should not share this life as they had shared others, but decide she had – and many times she had regretted it.

The attention he was paying her now should have made her happy. But somehow it was making her uneasy instead. The expression in his eyes was anxious and brotherly. Why was he treating her like this? She pulled her arm impatiently away from him when he next tried to help her over a stream. This was not what she wanted of him. She felt constricted by his solicitousness – even angry. Suddenly she started to run.

As quick and light as a young doe, she sprang over mossy boulders beside the stream and away over the deep layers of leaves that covered the forest floor. Before he realised what was happening she had disappeared into the thicket. For a time he chased after her, calling her name, but soon even the sounds she had been making ceased. He found himself far off the track and there was no sign of her. It was not the first time in his life he had been angry with Deva.

What should he do now?

He called and called but there was no answer. In growing alarm he realised that they were both lost to each other – and lost in the forest. He remembered the vision in the night and wondered if the two figures he had seen had anything to do with their present predicament. He blamed himself for bringing her into the forest. She might well have been safer among the villagers. He remembered that Farla was highly trained in Temple lore even if she had not reached the final grades. Perhaps his best plan was to return to Hael now and seek her help.

Miserably he started to retrace his steps as best he could, following the trail of twigs he had crushed. But before long he lost the trail, and found himself going round and round in circles over the same ground, with no familiar landmarks to give him a clue whether he was near or far from his destination. He became more and more agitated and less and less capable of making decisions. At last he sat down again and tried to calm himself. Kyra’s insistence that one should always find one’s way in one’s heart before attempting to find it in the external world, came back to him.

She had told him that, when he was looking for something he had lost, he should stop worrying about it – he should even busy himself with something totally unrelated to the object he sought. ‘The agitation of your mind,’ she said, ‘hides it from you. It is as though you have been stirring up the mud in a pool in a desperate attempt to find something on the bed of it. If you let the mud settle and the pool become clear again, you’ll be able to see to the bottom of it quite easily and find what lies there.’

It was some time before he could calm his mind sufficiently for the ‘mud’ to settle. He tried to think of Lark, but she seemed very shadowy and insubstantial. Deva’s vivid and quicksilver beauty was with him at every turn. He decided to concentrate on Kyra, calling to her over and over again for help. He had absolute faith in her – faith in her strength as a woman, as a friend and as a mother, and in her capacity as Lord of the Sun, as soul of a million years.

He knew she loved Deva without reservation, though Deva had caused her many griefs. If anyone could find her lost daughter, Kyra could.

Gradually the quiet began to take over. He did not know how long he sat thus, cross-legged on the forest floor, letting the names and the images of Kyra and Deva flow through his mind like water. But when he became conscious again of where he was and what had happened the sun was well past the zenith. Quietly he stood up and stretched, feeling his limbs cramped and stiff as though he had been in that one position a very long time. He no longer felt anxious. What would be would be. He set off walking – not knowing whether he was heading towards Hael or away from it – but within a very short time he saw the smoke and thatch of the village ahead of him.

He sought out Farla immediately and told her what had happened. At first she said there was nothing she could do, afraid to open those channels to the other realms she had so carefully closed when she made her decision to return to ordinary village life. But when he told her about the owl-woman and her horrible-looking companion that he had seen hovering over Deva in the night, she agreed at once to try.

She withdrew from the village to a little glade she knew nearby. She sat cross-legged on the grass in the centre of a circle of silver birch trees. A light breeze shivered the slender twigs, still only lightly touched with green. She tried to concentrate as Khu-ren had taught her – choosing one leaf of the thousands around her, trying to enter it with her imaginal mind to seek out the hidden pathway of the sap that flowed in its veins and follow it down through the twig, the branch, the trunk to the root, there to feel the earth around her – the same earth on which Kyra stood, the same earth that linked all earth’s living creatures... She had always found this method, of all the ways she had been taught, the best for her. ‘In meditation never strain... never force yourself to do something that doesn’t come naturally to you.’ Khu-ren’s words rang in her head. ‘What works for you is the method you must stay with.’

* * * *

Khu-ren was on the road, travelling, when he thought he saw a silver birch tree growing beside the path suddenly take on the aspect of a woman. He stopped and blinked and looked again – but now it was no more than a tree with silver-white bark and tiny shimmering leaves. He walked on – but once again, out of the corner of his eyes, he had the decided impression that it was a woman. He stood still and allowed the image to manifest more clearly. Now it seemed that it was a young woman he recognised:

Farla, Kyra’s favourite student. Farla, who had left the Temple to marry a farmer. The image faded.

Why? he asked himself. Why? He frowned. He had just left a village where there was a very formidable evil force. An entire family was being systematically killed by a curse-spell. He had saved the life of the last one only with tremendous effort. In his questioning of the villagers he had learned that this family had had a child called to be the apprentice of a sorceress. They had refused to let it go – and one by one they had died. No accidents, no illnesses – just death.

Could Farla be connected with the events in the village? He didn’t like to think so, but he had been puzzled as to why she had left the Temple training so suddenly. The kind of thing he had encountered in the village was often the work of a man or a woman who was disaffected, resentful, the possessor of undisciplined psychic powers without the necessary spiritual stature to contain them. This was the reason why the Temple was so anxious to call all youngsters who showed unusual psychic abilities to training at the Temple, and this was why a great deal of the training was on control and discipline – and even more on trying to instil a lively sense of responsibility and an understanding of the nature of good and evil. He hoped he was wrong about Farla... but why had she appeared just at this moment when his mind was occupied with the question as to who was playing so powerfully on the fears of the villagers?

* * * *

Farla started, her heart pounding. As clearly as though he were standing only a short distance from her she had seen the image of Khu-ren. As suddenly as it had been there, it was gone.

She had been trying to reach Kyra – but it was Khu-ren’s words about the method that had been uppermost in her mind, so it was Khu-ren she had found. She was excited that she had not forgotten everything, though the fact that she was so off-target made her nervous. She felt she had blundered into his presence and blundered out again, and was not at all sure if she could repeat what she had done. She suffered more than a twinge of regret for all she had given up.

Taking a deep breath she tried again... and again. But no further glimpses of either Khu-ren or Kyra were forthcoming.

Back in the village, Farla found Isar waiting for her, anxious to know if she had made any progress in contacting Kyra or finding Deva. He ran eagerly to meet her.

‘No,’ she sighed. ‘I can’t do it. I’ve lost the power. In the morning, if she has not found her way back here, we’ll have to send out an ordinary search party.’

She turned away from him to hide her tears of frustration.

* * * *

Kyra felt restless and depressed – but she was not sure at first if it was due to missing Khu-ren, anxiety about some of the work at the Temple that was not going well, or something more sinister: the sense of a shadow beginning to reach out for the bright heart of her world.

She retired to her favourite room in the house and prepared to go into the Silence. Before her, on a low table of yew wood, was a fine cotton cloth Khu-ren had brought from Egypt, his native country. She sat cross-legged on the floor beside it and began to compose herself for the task ahead, withdrawing her mind gradually from the teeming thoughts of the busy day. She did not try to fight them off, for that would have made them more persistent than ever. It was as though she made an appointment to deal with each one at a specific later time – and, content that they would indeed be given her attention later, they retired peacefully, leaving her free to concentrate on the matter in hand.

As one after the other left her, she narrowed her attention to the white cloth on the table. She fingered its edges, thinking about the plants growing in that hot and distant land from which it was woven; thinking of the weavers themselves living their lives in such a very different environment, part of such a very different culture, and yet making the same motions with their hands that the weavers of her own country made, thinking the same sort of thoughts, dreaming the same kind of dreams. She thought of the day her husband gave it to her, and of her decision to use it in this way. It was so fine and soft compared to the rough wool and flax weaving of her own country. It would do well to cover something special, something that was sacred to her that she did not want seen or touched by others.

When she was sure she was close enough to the Silence, she lifted the cloth and laid it aside. Before her on the tabletop lay her collection of crystals. One by one she picked them up and held them in her hand. It was as though they were light caught and held in solid form, so beautiful, so harmonious, so deeply suggestive of the mysterious spirit realms that are invisibly with us all the time – and yet at the same time reminding her of the solid earth, its generous and marvellous gifts and secret splendours.

Each had a story to its finding, and each was of particular significance for Kyra, but one in particular seemed to her more magical than all the others. She reached for it now and held it up to the shaft of sunlight that shone through the window. It was a quartz crystal, as transparent as clear water, faceted to perfection – and within it was another, smaller, quartz crystal, equally perfect. Her heart always beat faster when she saw it. It seemed to her to suggest the individual soul within the greater matrix of eternal spirit.

As she gazed into the depths of this double crystal, the light flashing and echoing from facet to facet, within and without, she felt herself leaving the confines of her everyday self and expanding her awareness to that of her greater, eternal Self. In that state she felt Urak’s  threat to their lives, though as yet she had no idea of what the threat consisted.

She glimpsed an old woman, almost skeletal, with sunken cheeks and ash-white hair, sitting cross-legged at the mouth of a huge gaping hole in the side of a mountain, her knees like sticks poking out on either side of her from beneath a skirt of coarse black wool. At first Kyra could not make out what she was doing, but then she saw that between her bony hands she held a dark crystal orb. Her thin lips were muttering some incantation that Kyra could not hear. From time to time she passed her hands over the orb as though she was having difficulty seeing into it and was trying to clear it of some misty impediment. Around her, in the air, Kyra could see strange geometric and arcane signs flickering strong and flame-like one moment, weak and vapour-like the next.

She was startled by the apparition but knew that if she did not act quickly, before the witch-woman consolidated her spell, she would lose the opportunity. She could sense the web of evil the woman was trying to weave with those signs – though she still had no idea of its specific nature or against whom it was directed. She believed that it had relevance to the shadow she had recently felt closing in on their lives.

Kyra’s hand trembled very slightly as she raised her precious crystal closer to her eyes. She called on all the inner strength she had, the clear steady light that was the core of her being, and directed it through the crystal in her hand to the old woman in front of the cave.

* * * *

Hastily Urak covered her black scrying sphere. The flash of light that had just leapt from its surface had almost blinded her. Angrily she paced about her cave. Someone was interfering. For the first time in her long life someone was reaching out for her. She was accustomed to being the one who spied on the lives of others, who controlled, manipulated, interfered... Could there be a sorcerer more powerful than she?

She was annoyed that she had been so precipitate. She uncovered her sphere. She must find out the source of that light and take measures to prevent anything like that happening again.

But gaze as she might she could not see what had caused it; neither did it come again.

* * * *

Kyra had spent all the energy she possessed and was lying on a couch in her chamber exhausted, the crystal still clutched in her hand.

* * * *

Boggoron, Urak’s  ‘familiar’, left the mountain fastness at dawn. He had his instructions and he expected to enjoy carrying them out. He had lived most of his life among the high crags and secret limestone caves where he had been abandoned by his parents as an infant, and would probably never have lived long enough to know that the rest of the world existed had Urak not found him and cared for him. He worshipped her and never questioned anything about her. He accepted humbly the withering scorn she poured on him sometimes, frustrated as she was by the slowness of his wits and the clumsiness of his body compared to hers. There was no physical deformity that made him bend and twist the way he did; no misshapen leg that made him hop and stumble. He shaped himself to his own vision of himself. He believed he had no right to live except as tool for Urak. He believed he was not fully human. And it served Urak’s  purposes never to disabuse him of these misconceptions.

When he reached the open hills and the long rolling landscape, he began to feel a little uneasy. He hated being looked at and liked nothing better than to spy on others – but here there was very little cover. The first man to greet him was astonished when he jumped and slid away. ‘Up to no good, I’ll be bound,’ the farmer muttered, wondering if he should count his sheep. But there was no need. Boggoron was not seeking meat this journey. He was after something much more important.

He had covered a great deal of ground and was beginning to feel the exhilaration of being his own master for a change, when he suddenly found himself unaccountably sleepy.

‘Oh no!’ he thought irritably. ‘She’s going to call me back.’ Just when he was enjoying the journey, the new sights and sounds, the marvellous variety of people. He tried to fight the feeling of drowsiness – but could not. He lay down beside the road he was travelling and was instantly asleep. In his dream Urak appeared to him, as he knew she would. She was in the form of an owl with a mouse in its beak. He found himself running over the fields, following the shadow she cast on the ground, running faster than he thought it was possible for any man to run – until suddenly the running became flying and he was in the sky winging after her. She dropped the mouse deliberately and precisely on one of the roads leading off from a crossroads. He noticed that of the four stones that marked the directions, the one indicating the road to the north where she had dropped the mouse was pockmarked with little holes, while the others were smooth and grey.

He woke and found that he’d been asleep no more than a moment. No shadow had moved.

‘Well, at least I don’t have to go back,’ he muttered, and started walking again.

He found the crossroads, as he knew he would, and took the northern path beside the strange pockmarked stone. The feeling of freedom was gone. There was nowhere he could be that would take him out of range of her surveillance.

* * * *

As the night grew darker the forest began to change character. The silence brought about by the cessation of birdsong at sunset was soon filled with all kinds of rustlings and cracklings and squeakings as the creatures who thrived when the earth had turned its face from the sun came into their own: creatures that could see Deva – but which she could not see.

She was exhausted and frightened. She could not understand how she could have become so utterly lost so quickly. Surely Isar was not far away, nor Hael itself more than an hour or two distant. She had no idea how large the forest was, nor how rarely it was penetrated this far.

She sank down upon a bank of ferns and knew she could go no further. Her voice was hoarse from calling; her legs scratched and aching. She lay back and shut her eyes. How long would the kaleidoscope of shadows turn round and round in her mind? Tree after tree moved past her, black as a moonless midnight, branches reaching out for her and lashing her face, brambles fastening their tiny claws into her.

Deva must have dropped off to sleep at last, but she woke in a cold sweat to hear the sounds of some large animal moving near her. She sat up instantly, crushed bracken leaves sticking to her hair, her cheek and her clothes. She peered into the darkness, now no longer so dark. Dazed, she blinked and stared. Moonlight was shafting through the branches and making patches of the forest floor less dark. She crossed her arms and hugged herself, partly with fear and partly with cold, trying to stop the shivering that threatened to give her presence away to whatever nocturnal predator was snuffling close by.

She thought of running, but she knew she couldn’t run in that darkness; and even if she ran she might well encourage whatever it was to pursue her. She waited, desperately afraid. She felt a jagged stone against her foot and tried to loosen it from its bed of earth and leaves without making a sound. Working on the stone took her mind off her fear, and when she had prised it loose she gripped it between both feet and drew it towards her. The sounds the heavy animal was making were getting louder and closer. She made a dive for the stone and held it ready in her right hand, staring with close attention at the break in the bushes towards which the sounds were heading.

At last a snout with two bright eyes appeared, closely followed by the large but not ungraceful white and black body of a badger. It seemed not to notice her at all but stepped out into the patch of moonlight, closely followed by its mate and a string of young. Deva relaxed her grip on the stone in her hand. It felt strange to be so totally ignored by the animals – almost as though she were not there at all or had been accepted as part of the forest itself.

She watched until they were out of sight, deep in the undergrowth again, and then stood up and stretched. She wondered if now she was rested it would be sensible to try to walk on. The purposefulness with which the badgers had been moving made her feel that the forest was not such a labyrinth after all.

She took a step, and turned her ankle in the hole she herself had created by prising out the weapon-stone. She winced and rubbed it anxiously... worried that she might not be able to walk on it. Gingerly she tested it and found that it hurt a great deal.

‘Stupid!’ she muttered to herself. How many stupid things had she done in this one day? She bit her lip, but she was determined not to cry. ‘Why not?’ she muttered bitterly. ‘No one would see if I did.’ But even as she thought this she felt that she was being watched. She spun round and stared into the shadows. She told herself that the place must be alive with small nocturnal animals, many of which would be hiding under the twigs and the leaves observing her. But she still felt uneasy and looked up.

On a branch in the moonlight a huge owl was sitting, its eyes fixed on her as though she were its prey.

* * * *

In the morning Deva bound her ankle with a strip torn off her tunic. It was swollen and painful, but she was determined it would not hold her back. She sought and found a sturdy stick and began to hobble through the forest. In daylight her predicament did not seem so bad. She had no doubt that she would soon break through to clear country where there were villages, or she would find a path. She set her direction by the sun, and blamed the blind circles of the evening before on the fact that she had not done so.

She was bitterly cold and remembered with something more than nostalgia the warmth of Isar’s body against hers as they sheltered from the storm. The longing she had to be with him again was overwhelming. Gya, her husband, and all they had shared together, meant nothing to her any more. They had been strangers when they married, and they were strangers still. But Isar and she – now that was different! Their roots went very deep. She had been a fool to let him go. Savagely she hit out at a fern stem about to unfurl and knocked its head off with her stick.

‘I’ll have Isar again – come what may!’ she said aloud. ‘We should never have been parted.’

A few moments later she found a path and confidently set off along it.

Already her ankle was feeling better. The mist that had been clinging to the damp ground was lifting and the sun was beginning to warm the air nicely. She shrugged aside the terrors of the night and began resolutely planning how she would set about parting Isar from Lark. She knew it would not be easy. Everyone loved Lark, and she knew Isar himself had a very close and deep relationship with her because of the dangers they had faced under Na-Groth, and the fact that Lark had on more than one occasion saved his life. But when Deva wanted something, it was very unusual for her not to get it. She had no doubt that Isar, in spite of appearances to the contrary, was already hers.

The village she eventually came upon in the valley was still under mist, but the dogs and geese alerted the villagers to her arrival and she was soon surrounded by surprised but solicitous and friendly people. It seemed she was not the only visitor this chilly spring morning. A man had arrived a short while before her from the southwest and was already warming by one of the hearth fires.

When she heard this her heart leapt, thinking that it must surely be Isar. But she was disappointed. The man sitting cross-legged on the floor beside the smouldering wood of the central hearth was small and weedy, his shoulders hunched as though he were deformed, his grey hair matted over a low forehead. She took no more notice of him as she wolfed down the bread and milk the villagers pressed on her. It was only when she was replete that she glanced up at him again. As she met his eyes she was startled to see that he was staring at her intently, and that in his stare was something of recognition and something of triumph.

Chapter 4

The ghost-owl

Old as she was, Urak was still as agile as a mountain goat. She knew Boggoron had found Deva and she was excited. She left her cave as soon as the sun was high enough to melt the gleaming frost crystals, a stole of lynx fur over her bony shoulders and a long woollen cloak keeping her warm against the breeze that came off the snow still lingering on the high peaks. She felt like celebrating and she wanted a crowd. She had long since lost all contact with the villagers who lived in the valleys. It was decades since she had emerged from the mountains in physical form, and no villager would dare venture into the gorge itself and brave the terrors of meeting the fearsome owl-woman against whom generations of parents had warned their children. Sometimes she had been lonely – but lately very rarely. She found the local villagers, when she spied on them, stupid and boring. No, when she was lonely it was other company she sought.

She made her way along the steep sides of the mountain until she came to a flat slab of rock, clear of pebbles and boulders. It was edged on the north side with spindly trees, nearly all of them twisted and deformed by the long struggle to find root-space in the meagre topsoil. There was one tree with which Urak felt a particular affinity. It was a dwarf oak, stocky and muscular, hardly taller than herself, growing from a crack above the platform, with a huge root that could be seen exposed along its whole length at eye level – growing sideways, not downwards, along a fissure. Sinuous as a huge serpent, its weathered surface was flaky and scaly – more like bark or the skin of a dragon than root fibre. It always excited her. She could feel the power with which it forced its way through the rock, the brute strength, the eager and restless energy. Trembling, she touched it and trailed her fingers along its length, moving as she did so along the platform to where the rock gave way to a sheer drop. There below her was a narrow chasm through which a turbulent river was pouring, dropping, falling, thundering into a deep pool far below.

For a long time she stood at the edge of the drop, her right hand on the dragon-scaled root to steady herself, watching the white water pouring, feeling the pull of it, the growing desire to fling herself over into it and be one with its awesome strength and speed. She was poised between the invisible, imperceptible power of the root, and the wild and visible violence of the water. In a state of tremendous agitation she at last forced herself to withdraw her gaze from the water. As she did so the white water became a still wall and the rock cliffs on either side of it flowed swiftly upwards.

It was the moment she was waiting for. The moment when the solid became fluid and the fluid solid.

She lifted both arms and the sunlight sparkled off the gems in her rings, the light from each of the stones dancing over the rock and across the chasm. Suddenly a rainbow blazed out above the pool. In that instant a fish leapt, its silver-dark form caught for an instant in the coloured spray.

‘Now!’ she screamed, knowing the magic of the moment must be taken swiftly at the zenith of the leap before the fall began.

Suddenly the invisible became visible and with her on the rock platform she saw a crowd of beings – bird forms and animal forms known usually only in myth and legend, human shadows and husks, strange supernatural formless gleamings and mists, winged beings flickering between light and dark as though they couldn’t quite decide which way to be...

Triumphantly Urak turned to them.

‘Friends,’ she cried. ‘I have found my heir. Soon she will be here among us. Soon we will begin her training. She will walk with you, talk with you, learn from you.’

The creatures writhed around her with delight. Soon they would have another physical vehicle to use, another voice to speak for them. They began to dance and sing, and Urak swayed to their rhythm on the very edge of the precipice – exhilarated by the danger and by the heady violence of their ecstasy.

* * * *

Deva herself was not aware that any momentous change was about to take place in her life. The stare of the stranger puzzled and annoyed her and she took pains to turn away from him, dismissing his attention as being the usual male reaction to her beauty. And if he recognised her, that too could be explained by the fact that at the Temple she was well known as the daughter of the two great Lords of the Sun, Guardians of the Tall Stones. She told herself she had imagined the look of triumph.

Boggoron bided his time. The morning was almost gone before he made the opportunity to talk to her. The people of the village, on hearing the story of the night, had persuaded her to rest with them while they sent a messenger to Hael to find out if Isar had returned there. It seemed the two villages were not a great distance apart, and linked by a well-worn track. The villagers were convinced Deva had been spell-led to wander in circles. They told her that none of them would venture off the path at nightfall. Several of them had tales to tell that made Deva shiver, and she was glad she did not have to pass another night in the forest. One man had heard the sounds of chopping wood on a windless, moonlit night, and when he went to investigate, puzzled that a woods-man should be working so late, a huge tree started to fall towards him. Terrified, he struggled to get out of its path. He remembered to this day the way the twigs and brambles tore his skin as he scrambled and tumbled through the undergrowth. He managed to get out of the line of fall, and, cowering under the shelter of another tree, he listened to the cracking of branches and the roaring as the giant fell, smashing and tearing everything in its path. He even felt the rush of the air it displaced. Afterwards, when the sounds died down, he ventured out to see if the woods-man who had felled the tree was injured. He found no trace of either man or fallen tree.

‘What had happened to them?’ Deva breathed, fascinated.

‘I heard later that a woods-man had been killed by a tree he had felled on that very spot when my grandfather was a boy,’ replied the man.

Others assured her that the trees themselves sometimes appeared to have a kind of malevolence towards people. One man had been deep in the forest in the late afternoon and had had an unnerving experience.

‘It was a dark part of the forest,’ he said. ‘The trees were close together. Hardly any sunlight filtered through. I was gathering mushrooms. I was perfectly happy. I remember I was even whistling. My basket was filled to overflowing and my only worry was that I hadn’t brought a bigger basket. I didn’t realise how the time was passing and that the sun was already setting.’

Deva could see by the faces of those gathered around them that they had heard the story many times before, and that they both loved and hated to hear it. What was it about the darkness that both fascinated and terrified humankind? She had not heard one story about the dangerous animals that lived in the forest. The fears were all of the supernatural, the unknown. It was as though in daylight one easily forgot the mysterious vastness of the universe and all the things about it one did not begin to understand. But in darkness, without any other distractions, one remembered. The fiercest warrior was vulnerable and alone.

‘Go on,’ someone urged. ‘Tell her what happened!’

‘The sun set before I could get out of the forest,’ he said. ‘Suddenly. I’ve never known the night to come on so fast.’ He paused again, for effect.

‘Go on,’ breathed his listeners.

‘It was not so much what I saw,’ he said. ‘It was what I felt. I knew the trees were watching me. I could feel them moving nearer: crowding me, staring down at me, trying to crush me between them. I dropped my basket and ran, but it was as though the trees had made a wall round me and wouldn’t let me through. I felt the trees would somehow absorb me into their bodies. They would suck me into themselves. I remembered that other people had disappeared in the forest and never been seen again. I began to think that I now knew what had happened to them. I beat at the trees with my fists. I screamed at them. It was terrible, terrible...’ He was silent a moment, shuddering, remembering.

‘What happened then? How did you get out?’ Deva prompted.

He looked at her as though he had forgotten her existence. The audience was dead silent. And then he shook his head.

‘I don’t know,’ he said. ‘I never knew. I fainted. When I woke it was morning and I was all right. The trees were back in their places. I never went back there.’

Deva was disappointed. She wanted more.

‘Did you have any dreams during that faint?’

‘No.’

‘Are you sure?’

‘I remember nothing.’

‘You remember nothing,’ Deva said thoughtfully, ‘but all kinds of things might have happened to you without your knowing it.’

‘What kinds of things?’ the man asked.

‘Dreadful things,’ Deva said darkly, warming to her own line of thought.

The audience drew closer, sensing a new twist to the story.

‘Things that may have changed you – permanently.’

The man looked alarmed. His wife gasped.

‘Nonsense,’ he said sharply. ‘I escaped unharmed.’

‘How do we know you are the same person who went into that forest that day?’

‘Of course I am!’

‘But how do you know? You may have been sucked up into those trees as you thought and even now you are screaming to be let out.’

‘But...’

She turned to the listeners and pointed her index finger at Berd, the storyteller.

‘The man we see before us might well be a forest-ghoul given human shape.’

His friends and neighbours, even his family, drew back in horror.

‘What are you saying!’ cried the man. ‘I am Berd. You all know me. I am the same.’

‘Has anyone noticed anything different about him since he came out of the forest that day?’ Deva demanded.

Berd looked from one to the other of his fellow villagers in growing panic. Not one denied what Deva was suggesting. He could see that the seed of suspicion she had planted was growing in each of their hearts. One by one they came up with incidents which, they said, indicated how they had noticed something strange and odd about him since that day. Not one of them had thought anything of it at the time.

‘Stop it!’ cried Berd. ‘There’s nothing different about me. The trees didn’t touch me. I was just imagining it. I was afraid because of the dark. They didn’t touch me! Nothing happened!’

‘You hear how he denies it?’ Deva said softly. ‘You hear how angry he is that he is found out? You hear how he changes his story, the story he has told you scores of times?’

People were backing away from him, looking at him with disgust and horror. Several began to pick up stones and hold them ready, watching him warily.

‘What are you doing to me?’ Berd appealed to Deva. ‘Do you realise what you are doing?’

‘Why are you sweating? Why are you shaking?’ she heartlessly persisted. She could feel the power of her words. She knew she could easily destroy this man. She knew she could sway the minds of all around him and destroy even the village if she wanted. The feeling was intoxicating. Her cheeks glowed. Her eyes were unnaturally bright.

Boggoron watched and listened – delighted. She was everything he had been told to expect. She would be a worthy heir for Urak, the owl-woman. He noticed how the people hung on her every word. He noticed how the children clung to their mothers’ skirts. Even the big, tough men were pale with fear. But above