The next day she started enquiring about ‘the haunted mound’ and tried to find out as much as she could about its history. The first people she asked knew nothing more than that it was haunted.
‘What kind of ghost haunts there?’ she asked. But no one seemed to know. She could find no one who had ever seen the ghost, nor even spoken to someone who had. The legend of its haunting must be very far back in the past.
From one of the oldest priests she managed to establish that the mound had been raised before the building of the Temple of the Sun.
‘There is a legend that a great and powerful king from over the seas came to this land in the ancient days, conquered its people and lived in great splendour for many years. Some say it is his burial mound.’
‘He must have been very powerful indeed to command such a burial,’ Kyra said, looking round and comparing the not inconsiderable mounds around the Temple which housed the dead of many noble families from many countries in the world.
‘Aye,’ the old priest said. But that was all he knew.
And with this she had to be content for some time.
The lake that used to be beside the mound some old people remembered.
It had been drained during the lifetime of the present High Priest and she longed to ask him about the lake and the mound, feeling strongly that the two were connected, but she was still too much in awe of him to attempt a confrontation.
10
The Return of Wardyke
At last the time arrived for her to study the choosing of the stones.
The day their teacher chose to visit the Field of the Grey Gods was a bright and sparkling one. A day on which it was hard to believe in the dark side of life.
The students chattered happily as they wandered up the long path to the Ridgeway from the Temple. Vann picked some daisies and made little crowns for Lea and Kyra.
Kyra laughed and let down her hair which was now almost to her knees. She looked like a nature spirit as she began dancing along ahead of the others, her eyes shining, her crown of daisies slightly lop-sided, her gold and shining hair flowing out around her in the breeze.
She felt something good was going to happen today, and if it did not she would make it happen!
‘Kyra!’ called Lea laughing, but Kyra did not hear.
She knew the way to the Field and she had waited a long time to be allowed to visit it. There was no holding her back now.
At the point where the path from the Temple joined the Ridgeway some young trees had grown up since she, Karne and Fern had first stood hesitating there, and she did not see the figure resting in their shade until pirouetting happily, she arrived among them.
And then she stopped. Before her stood the Lord Khu-ren.
He had not seen her since the time she took her Star test and had fallen so wanly into his arms. It was difficult to believe it was the same girl, she was now so full of light and life.
Even the sudden shock of his appearance where she did not expect him could not discomfit her this day.
She met his dark eyes with a sparkling blue, and bowed to him with a slightly exaggerated and mocking movement, glancing up immediately to see how he was reacting.
He was smiling.
‘My lord,’ she said. ‘I think this is one of the good days in the world!’
‘I would agree,’ he said, his eyes following the light that glanced off her long hair.
‘I think, my lord,’ she said, her face alight with mischief, ‘this day I am going to dare the gods to do their worst!’
And before he could grasp what she meant, she darted forward, flung her arms around him, stood on tiptoe and kissed him passionately on the mouth.
She had meant to dart away again and disappear along the Ridgeway before she could pay the penalty for her audacity, but she reckoned without his own feelings in the matter. When the other students arrived several moments later they found the golden Kyra locked helplessly in the close embrace of the tall dark Lord from over the sea, both of them oblivious to the amazed crowd of onlookers.
The students of course were delighted, but their teacher was old and sour and might not have the same reaction.
When Lea heard him puffing up the hill almost within sight of this astounding scene, she hastily touched Kyra’s arm and called out to attract their attention.
And then it was for the first time the two dazed people saw that they were not alone.
Scarlet, Kyra drew back from Khu-ren, and he in his turn went a deeper shade of sunburn.
They would have stood there confused and shaken forever if Lea had not taken the situation in hand and led Kyra away.
When the teacher-priest finally came to the trees he found only the lord Khu-ren standing there, the others running like children and laughing as they ran along the Ridgeway to the Field of the Grey Gods.
The hot and puffing priest bowed to the tall young man, mentioned the heat of the day and passed on.
‘Peculiar look he had on his face,’ the old man thought, but then thought no more about it.
Khu-ren stayed there a long time, watching the landscape as it stretched below him in every direction, carefully winding several strands of very long and very golden hair about his finger until it became a ring.
* * * *
The rocks used for the sacred circles of standing stones were each chosen for a particular reason. Sometimes people dragged them for hundreds of miles from their original resting place rather than use the rock local to their community.
The students had grown sensitive to the inner forces of themselves and of the world around them. Those who had not had left the college and returned to their homes.
Of those who remained some would study to be village priests, leaving the college when they had a certain standard of general knowledge in the different disciplines. Others would stay on and specialize, rising higher in the priesthood. Vann wished to stay on and specialize in healing, Lea in dream interpretation, while Kyra looked to be a ‘spirit-traveller’ and perhaps, eventually, a Lord of the Sun.
The choosing of the rocks suitable for the tall stones of a Sacred Circle was a specialization in itself, but they were all to attempt at least to understand a little of what was involved.
Kyra had seen the strange field of grey rocks before on her original journey to the Temple, but many of the other students had not. They were amazed and somewhat apprehensive when they heard the legends that were associated with the stones.
Not one of them dared approach the stones until the priest, their teacher, had finally arrived, very red in the face and out of breath.
He allowed himself to cool down in the shade of the trees that edged the field while he discussed with them the method he proposed to use in training.
Today they would wander in the field and each try to find a rock that gave them a particularly strong ‘feeling’.
‘You may find a rock that has vibrations for one of you, has none for another. This we will discuss later. The first stage is for you to get the “feel” of the rocks.’
‘Now go!’ he said, and waved his plump hand at the field.
The students scattered like feathers before a wind across the Field.
At first they darted from rock to rock, putting their foreheads against the cold stones, sensing nothing, and moving off immediately to another. But after a while they began to realize they were being too hasty. None of them was getting anything from the rocks, and it was apparent the teacher expected at least some of them to get something.
So they slowed down and gave each rock a longer time to respond to their overtures.
Kyra remembered her old village and the Sacred Circle there, and the training she had already received from Maal to feel the power in the tall stones. She had an advantage here over the other students and it was she who first found a stone that she was sensitive to in the Field.
It was a strange shape, almost like a throne.
She felt tempted to sit on it and pretend to be a q
ueen, with Khu-ren at her side as king. But she restrained herself and knelt beside it instead, her head resting on the hollow that time and the weather had excavated.
There was something about it.
Several times she left it, not sure that she could feel anything from it, but several times she returned.
There was something.
She closed her eyes and concentrated, tried to feel deep into the stone, to become the stone in a sense, to feel it feeling her.
There was certainly something between them, but she could not explain it.
After a time she stood up and moved away.
‘I do not feel vibrations,’ she said to herself, ‘I just feel a sort of sympathy. That cannot be what the teacher meant!’
And she firmly walked away from the stone.
But whatever other one she tried, she could not get the one like a throne out of her mind, and so eventually she returned to it and sat upon it, waiting patiently for the elderly priest to work his way right round the field from student to student until he reached her.
She would tell him what she felt, though she was not at all sure that it was what she was meant to feel.
After a while she began to feel strangely drowsy... or was it dizzy?
The others seemed to be getting further and further away, the sounds of the birds and the talking of the teacher and the students fainter and fainter. She looked around her, slightly puzzled, but not alarmed. Even the colours around her seemed to be changing subtly and those that had been dark now seemed to be light, and those that had been light seemed now to be dark.
‘How strange,’ she remembered thinking, and then she was conscious of nothing more.
* * * *
When she awoke she was lying on the grass of the Ridgeway, away from the Field, the anxious faces of her teacher and her fellow students gathered closely around her and staring at her.
Vann, who had great natural powers of healing in his hands, was holding her head. She felt life and consciousness mercifully flowing back into her body.
‘What happened?’ she murmured, her lips very dry.
‘You must have found a powerful stone,’ the teacher said, and then to the others, ‘Stand back and give her some air.’
Looking considerably relieved at her recovery the others moved back. Only her special friends, Lea and Vann, staying close to her.
‘stone?’ she muttered stupidly, not remembering anything clearly.
‘One of the special stones we were looking for,’ Lea said softly. ‘Remember?’
‘You see you should not have spent so much time on it,’ the teacher scolded. ‘I meant you to locate one and then call me. I found you lying all over it!’ he accused. ‘No wonder you fainted!’
She was amazed.
She began remembering now.
‘But...’ she began.
‘You see,’ the teacher went on scolding, ‘the forces in the earth are very strong. In certain places stronger than in others. In certain rocks stronger than in others. In certain people stronger than in others! You must be very sensitive to energies and forces hardly felt by others, and you must have found a rock particularly charged with special power. You should have been more careful!’
‘Oh,’ said Kyra.
While she was recovering, the students went to the special stone Kyra had found and tested themselves against it. Some of them could feel strangeness in it. Others could sense nothing.
The teacher pointed out that this was why certain priests who had the aptitude for sensing power in rock, sometimes travelled days and months to places where a new circle was to be built.
‘Not everyone can feel the natural currents in the earth. Those who can, pick out the stones and the places of natural energy where they are to be erected. Once they are raised in their correct places by the correct ceremonial procedures and are used in a community as a Sacred Circle, the natural energies in the stones and in the earth combine with the forces generated by the ritual worship of the people to become very powerful indeed. The inner circle of our Temple has power to transport the spirits of initiates across the world.’
Kyra remembered the meeting of the Lords of the Sun in that very circle many summers ago when she was a desperate, half-tutored girl, asking for their help.
* * * *
When she was strong enough to stand and walk, one arm linked through Vann’s and one through Lea’s, the teacher led the whole group back to the college.
As they walked they talked in little groups about the unseen threads of force that were woven through the fabric of the earth.
‘Sort of keeping it together,’ one said.
‘Alive,’ another said.
‘I have heard,’ a third joined in, ‘that over great periods of time the pattern of flow sometimes changes and Sacred Circles have either to be abandoned or moved to find the new route of the energy flow.’
‘Almost like a river that changes its course?’
‘Almost like that.’
As they reached the crossing of the Ridgeway and the path leading down to the Temple, Kyra’s attention wandered from what the others were saying and relived the moment of great happiness she had spent in the arms of the Lord Khu-ren such a short while before.
There was no sign of the young Lord now, but she noticed the daisy crown Vann had made for her lying on the grass where it must have fallen from her hair.
She smiled, relieved.
So strange had been the happenings since, she would not have been surprised if that incident had proved to be a dream or a vision.
It was not always easy to be sure which one of the different types of reality one was experiencing.
* * * *
She longed to see the Lord Khu-ren again, but it was not to be for some while.
Soon after the incident of the rock in the Field of the Grey Gods she visited Karne and Fern.
She found children in the garden playing happily, but Fern and Karne in some distress.
Isar ran up to her at once and took her hand and led her off to see the dam he was building in the stream. Seeing him today so full of childish fun she could not believe he was the same tall and vengeful warrior she had seen on top of the haunted mound.
After she had spent some time with him and helped him move a boulder or two, she managed to withdraw and visit his parents.
‘What is the matter?’ she asked at once, on seeing their faces.
‘Wardyke!’ Karne said immediately, and her heart sank.
‘He arrived here yesterday and wanted to see Isar,’ Fern said miserably.
‘ “His son”, he called him,’ Karne said bitterly.
‘Oh no!’ Kyra looked distressed. She had hoped they had heard the last of Wardyke when they banished him from their community and stripped him of all his powers as magician-priest.
‘What did you do?’
‘I told him to go, there was no son of his here!’
‘And...?’
‘He just smiled ... and went.’
Kyra looked surprised.
‘But oh, Kyra,’ said Fern, ‘if you had seen his smile! I know we have not seen the last of him!’
‘How was he? Do you think he has regained his powers in some way?’
‘No, I do not think so,’ Fern said thoughtfully. ‘When I first saw him I felt almost sorry for him...’
Karne snorted and it was clear he had not felt the same.
‘He has aged a great deal. His hair is quite grey and he is very thin and ragged looking. He must have been wounded in some way because his left arm and his left leg are sort of ... well, he sort of drags them ... he does not use them properly.’
‘Has he seen Isar at all?’
‘No. Nor will he!’ said Karne fiercely.
Fern looked less certain.
‘Do you think he has?’ Kyra asked her.
‘It is possible ... I cannot keep him with me in the house all the time. He runs about the village with the other children and plays a great dea
l down by the stream. It would be easy for Wardyke to come upon him one day.’
‘Of course his unusual red hair would give him away as your son,’ Kyra said musingly.
Karne looked at the long dagger Olan had given him that was hanging on the wall behind them.
‘No, Karne. That is not the answer and you know it.’
Karne knew she was right, but down here in the south ways were different, and many quarrels were settled with violence where in their small quiet northern community it would have been unthinkable.
‘Settled?’ Kyra asked, seeing into his mind suddenly with great clarity. ‘Nothing is settled that way. You just move the problem to another time, maybe another life, and have to undo what you have done in ways that may well be more unpleasant for you than the original problem.’
‘I know!’ Karne said impatiently. ‘I know.’
And he left the house muttering that there was much work to be done.
‘He is very worried,’ Fern said gently in his defence.
‘I know, and it is easy for me to talk about keeping feelings under control...’ she said wryly.
Fern could not catch the implications of the remark as she did not know about Kyra’s love for the Lord Khu-ren.
‘What will I do, Kyra,’ she pleaded, ‘if he were to take him away from me?’
‘He has no right!’
‘Of course not. But he might still do it.’
Kyra was silent, thinking.
Fern went on talking.
‘The garden and the trees watch over him and I can “feel” when he is in trouble. But I fear one day it may be too late before I reach him. The feelings I get are not specific. I feel danger and pain and love, but exactly where the danger is, is not so easy.
‘I have made friends with Panora again. I called her back and apologized. She is with Isar a great deal and I will warn her to watch out for Wardyke.’
This did not comfort Kyra much. She had never been able to shake off the feeling that Panora was somehow malevolent.
She had told Fern of Panora’s connection with the Lord Guiron, but for some reason Fern refused to accept it as a warning. She pointed out Isar was Wardyke’s son and yet had nothing of Wardyke in him.
The Temple of the Sun Page 15