* * * *
Kyra woke as a beam of sunlight shafted through the door.
She was alert at once, remembering that she should have been at the High Priest’s house at sunrise.
Shouting, she poked and nudged Karne awake.
‘I am late!’ she cried. ‘I must go!’
She left him waking slowly as though from a deep and drunken stupor. She ran as hard as she could in the direction she remembered. There was pale sunlight everywhere and people were going about their early morning business as though everything were in order.
Breathlessly she arrived at the High Priest’s house to find no one there but Panora sitting on a rock and drawing pictures in the dust with a long stick.
‘Hello,’ she said cheekily.
‘I am late,’ almost sobbed Kyra. ‘What can I do now?’
Panora’s eyes twinkled as she squinted into the sunlight above Kyra’s head.
‘Follow that rook!’ she suggested, and laughed hilariously.
Kyra was on her way before she realized how ridiculous it was, but she was so confused by the strange girl, who by now she was quite convinced was no ordinary girl, that she followed the bird who she was also convinced was no ordinary bird.
She found herself, hot and breathless, in time to join a procession led by the High Priest over the little bridge into the Temple.
She was not dressed as the others were dressed and felt conspicuous and awkward.
The High Priest walked first, clad in very regal robes, and behind him many people of different ages, the younger ones at the back of the line, but all clad in neat tunics, well-tied sandals, with different coloured cords about their waists.
‘The cords must be some kind of indication of the progress of their studies,’ she decided, and looked around anxiously to see if there were any there like her without cords at all.
No. It seemed she was the only complete beginner.
She saw many of the others looking at her curiously, but no one spoke. She was ashamed that she had left in such haste she had not been able to comb or plait her hair and it stood around her shoulders now in a blonde and tangled mass.
Once within the circle the little procession made a slow progress around the circumference of the outer ring of stones.
This was followed by a hymn to the sun not unlike the one Maal had often spoken at the dawn. She began to feel less lost and strange. Ritual words were comforting, especially ones that linked people from so many different places.
She began to join in the responses to the hymn and found herself chanting quite a few that she did not know she knew. The voices of the others seemed to draw the right words from her until she was not sure if the sound she thought she heard from the voices outside herself was not actually her own voice from within. In some way she had become part of a composite Being, and the strength of all the people in the group was in that Being.
At the end of the hymn, the High Priest raised his arms and they were all silent. She knew she had to bend her head and shut her eyes. She did this and remained a long time in darkness and in silence.
In this state she knew that her first studies would be of dreams. How she knew this she could not say. But the knowledge came to her with the force of a command.
Simultaneously they all opened their eyes though no spoken word of command was given. She found herself following a particular group of students, knowing that they were the ones to be studying dreams.
She sat with them, cross-legged on the grass, at the feet of a teacher who asked each one in turn to relate the dream of the night before. Afraid that she would be asked to describe hers she racked her brain to remember what it had been. But her memory was blank. Since the beginning of that eerie song from Panora until she woke in the morning, everything in her mind had totally disappeared.
She gave up and listened attentively to the other students.
Each told what he had dreamed, the teacher interrupting occasionally to question and draw something out that the narrator had apparently been trying to hide. He seemed greatly skilled at knowing when the truth was being spoken and when it was not.
When the dream was exposed enough to satisfy the teacher, he began to ask questions of the class and draw out of them what they had understood by it.
Kyra was amazed by some of the suggestions and felt unwilling to expose some of her most secret fantasies to the scrutiny of these apparently ruthless critics.
After a dream had been analysed by the class and Kyra was sure there could not be a single thing left in it unaccounted for, the teacher would step in and reveal yet layer upon layer of significance hitherto hidden in the symbolism.
She was staggered at how complex a reflection of every level of consciousness in a person a dream reveals.
She was glad that for this day at least there was no time left when it came to her turn, and the class was dismissed before she had to speak.
The teacher indicated that Kyra and a boy called Vann were to remain behind. He smiled kindly at the two of them, more kindly than he had during the lesson. Kyra had begun to think she was afraid of him, his tongue had been so sharp, so ruthless in its quest for honesty.
‘The two of you are new,’ he said now, and Kyra looked with relief at the boy and he at her.
‘What is your name, girl?’
‘Kyra.’ Kyra said, relieved to find that not everyone in this formidable place could see directly into her head.
‘And where do you come from?’
‘From the far north,’ Kyra said.
‘Vann is from the west country. From the mountains.’
She smiled at him. He was not good looking, but had a pleasant face. Although he looked older than her, he was smaller in build.
‘He has been here a day longer than you and will show you where you will live and where you will find food. You will both wear an orange cord until you have passed the tests I set for you. Meanwhile you will work hard and obey me in everything.’
‘Yes, my lord,’ she said humbly.
‘Now go. You must be hungry.’
She was.
5
The Dream Test
While Kyra was settling in to her new life in the college of Mysteries, Panora was helping Karne and Fern find a suitable place for their new home.
Isar and Panora seemed to have a bond between them from the first, and the girl became more and more a part of their lives, carrying the baby upon her hip while they walked from village to village looking for the one where Fern felt most at home. Karne agreed for Isar’s sake that they should go as far from the Temple as they could and at last settled for a village that lay beside the banks of a stream, particularly rich in leafy shade and moss. The people seemed friendly and pleasant and not unlike the country people they were accustomed to in the north.
‘The first thing to be done,’ Panora said, ‘is to visit with the Spear-lord and ask his permission to join his community’
They had heard of the Spear-lords before they had reached the Temple, and Fern looked alarmed.
‘In our village we have the priest and seven chosen Elders to look after us,’ she said. ‘We know nothing of Spear-lords!’
‘Here it is different. The inner council of the Temple is the ultimate authority in the land, but in each village a Spear-lord rules his own people. They serve him and do his bidding in all things, and in return he gives them protection and tenure of some of his land.’
‘How did this come about?’ Karne asked with interest.
‘In a time the oldest people now living heard their grandparents talk about, a tall warrior people came to this land from over the sea. They were so strange and grand, carried such weapons and wore such clothes, the local people offered no resistance but welcomed them as lords. Many of them became priests in the Temple and took powerful positions on the council. In time, the custom we now have came about. It seemed to happen naturally, without violence. No one even questions it these days.’
‘Are they st
ill warriors?’ Karne asked.
‘We have had no wars here for many generations. But I have seen them fight amongst themselves with long daggers and axes, sometimes in anger, but more often for the sport of it. Some of their weapons are very beautiful. I have seen a dagger held to its haft with pins of gold intricately worked in a magnificent design.’
Karne’s eyes shone. How dearly he would love to have such a dagger.
‘Is this way of the Spear-lords a good way?’ Fern asked.
‘If the Spear-lord is a good man, it is a good way. If he is not...’ Panora shrugged and did not finish her sentence.
‘And what of the Spear-lord who rules this village?’ Fern asked anxiously
‘Look around,’ Panora said, ‘ ‘‘feel”.’
Fern looked around.
‘I feel peace here.’
‘And in the eyes of the people who live here?’
‘I see peace.’
‘Then he is good,’ she said shortly. ‘You would feel it if he were not.’
She led them through the village to a large house standing clear of the other houses, half way up a gradually sloping hill. Fern was happy when she noticed there were healthy looking plants and trees clustered about it.
The Spear-lord, Olan, was not at home, but his wife, Mar, and daughter gave the strangers a warm welcome, a drink of milk and a sweet-tasting honey cake to eat.
It was clear they knew Panora well, and Fern noticed with surprise with what respect these grand and elegant people treated the ugly, unkempt little girl. They listened to her request with favourable smiles and for a moment Fern fancied she had seen them bend the knee in a slight bow to her when she first entered their house. But she dismissed the idea from her head as soon as it entered. It could not be! To her Panora was just a friendly village girl who had adopted them because she was lonely and because she enjoyed organizing things and showing people round.
Olan’s wife and daughter were very beautiful and calm people, dressed in fine woven garments, both with earrings and bracelets of gold. The inside of their house had low couches spread with rugs of fur from animals they had never seen.
Fingering an unusual spotted fur, Karne asked if the animal had been hunted locally
The woman smiled.
‘No,’ she said, ‘these have come from over the sea. My husband has visitors from many lands. We often exchange gifts of local artefacts for things we do not find here.’
She held up a cup to the light that came streaming through a slit in the wooden wall, and it glowed translucently with a kind of amber light.
In answer to Fern’s unspoken enquiry she said, ‘Yes, it is amber.’
Fern was overwhelmed by the beauty and the richness of everything she could see, and by the grace and warmth of the two women.
It was arranged that Panora and Olan’s daughter should go with them to choose land for their home. It was made clear that Olan’s permission had still to be granted but, as Mar said, looking significantly at Panora, ‘If it is the wish of the High Priest, the Lord Guiron, there should be no difficulty in obtaining it.’
Again Fern felt there was something being communicated between Panora and the woman that they could not intercept.
* * * *
And so it was that before the autumn turned all the leaves to the colour of fire, Karne, Fern and Isar had set up house. Fern had even succeeded in starting the rudiments of a garden by taking plants already rooted and growing from the woods and fields and, with great tenderness and care, transplanting them to enclose her little home.
‘It will be better in the Spring,’ she told Isar. ‘The seeds I have planted will grow then. You will see. You will live in a garden full of love and loveliness and no harmful thing will come near you!’
She held him very close and kissed the top of his head. He was most precious to her. Most precious! She could not bear to think of the strange shadows that hovered over him.
Panora came on most days to help them or to play with Isar. She brought them many tales of what was happening in the other villages or at the Temple and so, although they hardly left their own small place, they were not out of touch with the rest of the area.
Karne grew to like and admire his Spear-lord Olan very much. He worked on Olan’s land for part of each day, but most of his time was spent on the strips of land he had been given for his own. The community cattle, sheep and goats were kept together and the villagers took it in turn to tend them, to lead them to pasture in the morning and back to the communal compound at night. Each villager had his mark upon some of the beasts. Not all belonged to the Spear-lord.
Karne made sure both his land and the land of Olan under his charge was well dug and turned over before the frosts came to harden it. That first autumn Karne and Fern had never worked so hard in their lives, but they were together, and they were happy.
The southern soil showed white when it was turned over and the strip fields waiting through the long winter for the early spring sowing made the landscape seem unusual to Karne. From the rugged north with its hard rock and dark earth, the soft, pale shading of the fields made them look ghostly and unreal.
Olan laughed when Karne told him this.
‘It is real enough in the Spring when the wheat is growing boldly. You will see how real it is!’
Fern delighted in the colours of the autumn trees, the gold and bronze of leaves and black of branch against the chalky earth.
She began to feel less homesick.
* * * *
Meanwhile, in the Temple College, Kyra’s life was very different.
Although her main work at first was concerned with the significance of dreams, she soon found that all the branches of learning in the great college were interrelated. From dawn to dusk, under the guidance of different priests, they studied not only dreams, but group and private meditation, healing, divination, and prophecy. Together with these more spiritual disciplines, they learned to control the body. There were even classes where they were taught to carve wood and stone into pleasing and significant shapes.
Under the guidance of Maal, she thought she had learned a great deal about ‘going into the Silence’ within herself. In that Silence she could be away from the distractions of the outer world and aware of the subtle and numerous realms of consciousness within her that linked her with the whole of which she was an organic part. In the Temple College she found that what she had learned from Maal was only the beginning. She learned greater control of herself, so that when she chose to ‘go into the Silence’ she went smoothly and efficiently instead of plunging in clumsily and almost accidentally.
She learned that what she did in the ‘Silence’ was not only of benefit to herself, but like a stone in a pool of water, the influence of it spread out in ever widening circles around her.
Not only in the ‘Silence’, but all the time, whether she knew it or not, she was, with the flow of her thought, influencing people outside herself, and they were influencing her.
Thought became more than just the rambling monologue she was accustomed to hearing within her head. It became a force that she respected, a force that perhaps had shaped the universe in the first place, but certainly shaped the day-to-day existence of all around her.
Each person creates his own world by his own thinking. It is given shape by how he sees it, and how he sees it depends on who he is.
‘In the study of this force we call “thought”,’ the teacher said, ‘we use many methods. Before we can use its power to influence the world around us, we must learn its power to influence us. We will not have the final mark of the priest upon us until we have learned not only what thought is and how to use it, but who we truly are and how we stand in relationship to the universe as a whole. Once we understand this we will use thought as a tool and not as a weapon, and it will be safe for us to be released upon the outside world as priests.’
They were taught that the thought that came from their ‘surface’ minds was the least significant, lea
st reliable of all the forms available to them.
In the silence of meditation they explored the infinite realms of the spirit, and in their study of dreams they explored the way those realms interacted with the finite and personal.
With the dusk their studies were not done. Sleeping became a kind of work as well. For it was sleep that gave them the material for their explorations of the inner levels of their consciousness.
When the priest-teacher thought it advisable, they worked within the Sacred Circle, using its ancient forces to strengthen their own powers of understanding, but all the preliminary discussions were held outside the circle.
In the winter, hide tents were erected for their shelter in the worst of the weather, but Kyra noticed one particular group never used the tents and in the fiercest, coldest conditions sat cross legged and flimsily dressed at the feet of their master.
‘Why is that?’ she asked, and was told that this was yet another branch of training that must eventually be undergone, training to control one’s body in such a way that heat or cold, pain or pleasure, could have no effect upon it.
Kyra remembered how Maal had controlled his own dying, lying buried in the earth for a long while apparently dead, and yet not dead.
‘They can even walk through fire and are not burned,’ Kyra’s informant told her.
‘You mean they just do not feel the burning?’
‘No, their flesh does not even show the burning!’
She was amazed once more at the incredible power of thought.
* * * *
Each day was so full of interest she scarcely felt the passing of time and woke one morning after a dream of Karne and Fern to realise that she had not seen them for a long time.
She determined to ask for time off from her studies to visit them.
That morning she told her teacher of her dream and how it showed quite clearly that she was missing them.
He smiled.
‘I see you are an expert already,’ he said, and his voice was slightly mocking.
The Temple of the Sun Page 9