by Manda Scott
‘The stone is not for you to place. Now is not the time.’
‘You make no sense.’
Knees splayed, she crouched before him. He was becoming more comfortable with her nakedness.
‘You moved across more than miles in your journeys, Cedric Owen; you moved also across centuries. What you saw did not take place here or now. You have travelled the song-line of your stone, which is not only distance, but also time. This is why you did not place the heart-stone. In that distant time – many years from now – another will be asked to place it, and may do so, if you can leave true word of where it must go and when.’
‘Then why …?’
Her hand clasped either side of his face. Her scarred cheeks were so close he went cross-eyed trying to see them properly. Her eyes held his and made them still.
She said, ‘Listen to me, and try to understand. Your task was to find where the heart-stone must go. Only that. I can tell you the day and the time at which Kukulkan may be summoned, but the location itself can come only from you. Having found it, you must leave word of both the time and place of Awakening for your successor in a way that cannot be lost a second time, but also cannot be found by those who would misuse it. You must do this; it is what you were born for.’
‘Then I have truly failed because I don’t know where the place was.’
He read the shock in her eyes. She shook her head in wordless horror. At length, frowning, she said, ‘Would you recognize it again if you saw it?’
‘Of course. The sight is burned on my soul. But I could search the length and breadth of Britain and never find it again.’
‘You will find it.’ She nodded to make them both believe it. ‘It is the second of your three life’s tasks. You have completed the first: to find the secret of the heart-stone. The second is to find where the stone must be placed at the end times, and the third is to hide the stone safely, leaving word of where it must go at the time when Kukulkan arises. The fate of the world rests on you, Cedric Owen. Therefore you will find it. It must be so.’
‘And I will die when all is done?’
‘The keeper always dies. It is the way of things. If you have lived for the stone, you will die at its passing.’ She squinted at him. ‘Better to die in the joy of a task fulfilled than simply at the end of a life. The stone grants life’s meaning. There can be no greater gift.’
Owen looked down at the blue stone in his hand. The feeling of it as part of him was new and to be cherished. He saw himself reflected in the shine of its cranium, and remembered having done so before.
He said, ‘I had silver hair in the grave mound.’
Najakmul leaned in to touch her brow to his. ‘Show me.’
‘I don’t …’
‘Make a picture in your head and show it to me in the stone.’
He was not thinking clearly, which was as well. He brought forward the memory of his own reflection in the blue stone; a scar lay across one cheek that he did not presently have, and his hair was as thick as it had always been, but silver almost to white. Because the stone was part of him, it shared the memory. He saw the mirrored image of himself change, and struggled to hold it.
‘Enough.’
Najakmul sat back. She reached up for him, and grasped both hands to his face and drew him forward and kissed his brow. The touch of it shuddered to his core. He felt himself flush with a child’s joy and a man’s pleasure.
‘Hush. You should sleep. Where you have been and what you have done is not easy.’
He was already half sleeping. Memories came to him, ethereal as dreams.
Thickly, he said, ‘In the time-yet-to-come I saw a young woman in the grave mound. She carried a blue stone, but I did not see if she placed it in its seating. A fog came and my sight was taken from me. I saw nothing of her after.’
Najakmul chewed her lip, nodding slowly. ‘Then it is not certain that she will succeed. We can only do our best to make it so. Kukulkan’s arising depends on it.’
She picked a stick and stabbed it into the fire to good effect; sparks flew high into the cool blue sky. ‘You excelled yourself, and we are proud of you, we who brought you to this. As we measure time, you laboured for four days and four nights without cease and you brought back the soul of your friend. Not one of us could have done better.’
‘Four days?’
‘And four nights. It is why you are so far gone and we must feed you to bring you home.’ She handed him another strip of meat. Through the chewing, he asked, ‘You sat with me through it all?’
She grinned, showing him white teeth. ‘It is what I was born for. This and to send you home when the time is right. Sleep and enjoy the marriage of your heart to your stone. It has been a long time waiting and it requires that you give thought to it.’
The pressure of his bladder woke him next time. The sun had moved backwards, from which he concluded that he had slept through at least one night and on into the following day.
He was alone, lying on a bed of grasses. A gourd of water was propped nearby. He drank and then rose and went out to relieve himself.
Najakmul no longer watched over him. Instead, Diego and his brothers fussed with the mules a short distance away. De Aguilar was nearby, dressed in the white linen shirt that Owen had brought for him, with the empty sleeve pinned up neatly. He had cut a long stick and was practising fencing moves, left-handed. He saw Owen and threw his stick away and came to sit by the fire at the mouth of the shelter.
‘Welcome. I had thought perhaps you would sleep until the snows come. Would you like food? I can cook corn pancakes now.’
‘Thank you, yes. Do the snows come here?’
‘They might do, eventually. There is some on the mountain peak.’ One-handed, de Aguilar cooked them both a pancake. The moves had the fluent look of sustained practice.
Owen said, ‘How long did I sleep?’
‘Perhaps best that you do not ask. It is a great thing you have done, even so little as I understand of it.’
‘It did not seem so at the time.’
‘Then it will not lead to arrogance, which is a good thing. I could not bear to be so indebted to an arrogant man.’ There was a new calm in de Aguilar’s eyes as he rolled the pancake and passed it across.
Owen said, ‘You are different.’
‘I have seen death and stepped past it. There is little to be afraid of now.’
‘What will you do?’
‘Whatever you ask of me. I am your swordsman. No—’ He held up his hand. ‘You cannot gainsay it. I will go where you say and do as you ask of me, but I will not leave, even if you plead, so spare us both the embarrassment of that.’
De Aguilar was relaxed and at the same time vibrantly alive, as he once had been after an attack on a dark night. It was a magnificent thing to see.
Owen felt the warm press of the bronze dragon on his chest. He lifted it and rubbed it lightly with his thumb. ‘I suppose we should return to England and seek out the place of the stone circle.’ He rubbed his face with his hands. He loved England, but he had no real wish to abandon all that he had found in the jungles of the jaguars.
Circumspectly, de Aguilar said, ‘Would you care to go back to your homeland a rich man or a poor one?’
‘Do I have a choice?’
‘I believe so. Najakmul has been called into the jungle to tend a woman in childbirth but she gave me to understand … that you had grey hair in your journeys?’
‘I did. Bright silver, like pewter. It was a strange thing to see.’
‘She said as much. It would seem that while the stone demands great things of you, it grants you also a great gift. We are given some grace to rest and enjoy each other’s company, this place and its people before we must return to England to fulfil your destiny.’
‘Some grace? How long? A week? A month? A season?’
‘Until you have silver hair, my friend.’ De Aguilar leaned forward and lifted a lock of Owen’s hair. With exaggerated interest, he studied the
roots. ‘Unless you have a bad shock, I would say perhaps thirty years …?’
‘Thirty …?’ Owen stared at him, and laughed, and went on laughing, knowing himself a fool but enjoying the feel of it, as he enjoyed the shiver of the leaves and the smell of the jungle and the murmured voices of Diego and his brothers as they quieted the mules against the sudden outburst from the crazy Englishman.
‘Half a lifetime and then you will come with me to England? Really?’
De Aguilar held a straight face a moment, then let a long, slow smile stretch to his eyes and beyond. ‘To England, where the unsullied grace of my king has married the damp and dusty shrew of your queen. Yes, I insist upon it. But not yet. First, we will live out the best parts of our lives in paradise, and make our fortunes in doing so.’
23
Lower Hayworth Farm, Oxfordshire, June 2007
ON THE LAPTOP in front of Stella were two more lines of text to finish the page.
3 Julye 1586, From Jan de Groot, trader, For: three shyps’ hold of Strong Sisal unmade into rope and one shyp of rope readie-made: diamonds to the value of £100 (one hundred pounds).
3 Julye 1586, Also from Meinheer de Groot, ane sword for a left-handed manne, craftit with grate skylle by the Brothers Gallucci in Turino, Italy, to the worth of £5, a gift.
The transcription of the ledgers had become her obsession, and she was glad of it. She picked out a line and drew it, and another, then pressed the keys to form the glyphs and sat back, rolling her shoulders as the techno-magic happened.
She was in Ursula Walker’s study, a place of high oak beams and limewashed plaster. Two French windows at the back opened on to an orchard and herb garden, unchanged since medieval times.
Ursula worked under the apple trees outside. Her legs were visible, poking out across a stretch of shaded grass. The paddocks beyond were silent; the brown patches where the tents had been had returned nearly to green.
A dragging footstep sounded from the doorway to the kitchen. Stella bent her head back to the laptop.
‘Coffee?’ Kit asked.
‘Thank you.’ She did not lift her head. ‘What time is it?’
‘Half past five. You’ve been at it for eleven hours. You should take a break.’
‘Soon. I’m nearly done.’
‘Gordon rang,’ said Kit. ‘He’s finished the analysis of the limestone section. He thinks the skull was immersed in the cave in the spring of 1589 – after Cedric Owen died.’
‘So we still don’t know who the skeleton was,’ Stella said. And then, ‘How’s the translation going?’
‘Slowly.’ Kit swayed on his two sticks. He had done everything he could to give up the wheelchair; he was walking better than he had been, but still badly. He still needed Stella’s help to dress and undress, and each time was less gracious about it.
Now, he leaned back against a wall for stability. ‘Cedric Owen is in the Mayalands, drinking smoke in the jungle with a woman who is also a jaguar. I think we forget how impenetrable Elizabethan writing can be even when it hasn’t been warped through the prism of ancient Mayan glyphs. Ursula’s asked Meredith Lawrence to come and help.’
‘I know. He came to say hello when he arrived. You were there.’
‘Of course. I’d forgotten.
They spoke as strangers and could not change it. In the four days since she had tried to heal him with the skull-stone, the hairline crack between them had become an unbridged, unbridgeable divide. They talked to each other only when they must and then in dislocated sentences, going through the motions of friendship and kindness.
What shocked Stella most was how easily and how fast they had fallen apart. She could remember that she had loved him, but she could not remember how or why. The cold in Kit’s eyes had become a steel wall and he no longer tried to pretend he was letting her in.
Nor did he make any effort to hide his loathing of the blue skull-stone. She had brought it out when Meredith had first come in and Kit had walked away rather than stay in its presence. He would not have come into the room now if she had not kept the backpack hidden under the desk.
There was nothing left to say. Stella pressed a key to open a new page and began to draw the lines that only she could see. When she heard him leave, she was more relieved than sorry.
Meredith Lawrence came to find her later, when she was halfway through the next volume. He leaned on the edge of the French windows, relaxed with his tie gone and his shirt sleeves rolled up. ‘Can you take a break?’
‘If you can give me a good enough reason.’
‘Not the one you want.’ He smiled an apology. ‘No date and time appointed. But possibly some pointers in the right direction. If you’d care to join us for some iced tea, we could show you what we’ve got?’
The garden was small and wild, with a roughly mown lawn and borders filled with kitchen herbs and straggling tomato plants tied loosely to the trunks of crab apple trees. Ursula worked on a tartan blanket under a cluster of late-flowering apples. Papers lay in an arc around her, weighted by small stones against the breeze.
She sat up and cleared a space as Stella approached. ‘Sorry, it’s a bit rustic. I lost the habit of working at a desk in Ki’kaame’s reindeer lands and never got it back. Would you like a chair?’
‘The blanket’s fine. I’m becoming chair-shaped as it is.’ Stella stretched out in the sun on the red and black tartan, resting her forearm across her eyes for shade. Kit was nowhere to be seen, for which she was grateful.
Some while later, she felt the shadow of Meredith pass across her, bringing the tea. She was warm and mellow by then, and not inclined to get up. Still with one arm over her eyes, she asked, ‘What have you got?’ Her voice had a tinge of Irish; a part of Kit she had not yet shed.
‘A dog and a bat,’ said Ursula. ‘To be more accurate, we have a pair of recurring glyphs that have no obvious bearing on the narrative. One depicts the head of a dog facing left, and one has a bat flying towards us. In isolation, they could mean all kinds of things from loyalty to hunting to dreaming to a specific member of a classical Mayan dynasty headed by Two Jaguar. Put together, they are almost certainly Oc and Zotz, part of a date in the Long Count of years.’
Stella lifted her arm from her eyes. ‘And in English, that would be …?’
Meredith was in her field of view. He spread his hands. ‘If we knew that, I’d have come to you a little more cheerfully.’
‘Without numbers, the glyphs are meaningless.’ Ursula’s voice floated on the late afternoon sun. ‘It’s like saying today is a Tuesday in June. If I don’t say it’s Tuesday the nineteenth of June 2007, you’re not actually any the wiser.’
‘Is that it?’
‘So far. We’re working on it.’
‘Great.’ Stella rolled over on to her stomach. ‘Four days’ work for a Tuesday in June. Why did Owen not just give us the date in plain text?’
‘He didn’t know which calendar to use,’ Meredith said, and when Stella looked him a question, ‘Owen had just lived through the administrative chaos that was the transition from the Julian to the Gregorian in which some – but not all – of the Catholic countries in Europe had cut nine days from their calendars while the Protestant ones, including England, chose to ignore the deviations of a Catholic pope. Half of Europe didn’t know what the date was and nobody could have predicted which version we’d be using five centuries later, if either. He had no choice but to use a system that he knew was accurate.’
‘And Mayan calendrics is accurate to 0.0007 of a second for sixteen thousand years, so he’d be safe with that,’ Stella said. Davy Law had told her so. It did not stop both Ursula and Meredith from being impressed. Briefly, she basked in that.
‘Where do we go from here?’ she asked, when the silence had stretched long enough.
‘We make an effort to think as Owen thought.’
Ursula reached for a pile of papers and fanned them out on the grass. The paired glyphs recurred on each page, outlined in yello
w highlighter.
‘Looking at it logically, if we assume that Owen knew the date, the time and the place to which the heart-stone needs to be taken, he was left with the almost impossible task of passing that information to you uncorrupted, while at the same time ensuring that it didn’t fall into the hands of Walsingham, or anyone else who might want to destroy the skull, or use it for their own ends. He will have done whatever he thought was best.’
Meredith said, ‘One obvious route would be to break up the information into fragments and hide each part in a different place. It’s what I would do, in Owen’s place. Which leads us directly to the medallion you found in the cave of the skull-stone, the one with the mark of Libra on the back.’
‘This?’
Stella reached into her shirt, pulled the thong over her head and held it out to him. There was a slide of cotton on linen as Ursula bent over Meredith to look, and a sigh of disappointment.
‘No numbers,’ Meredith said. ‘Not in English, not in Arabic or Roman numerals, not in the Mayan counting system, not even notches on the rim. I thought there must be something I’d missed the other day, but not a thing.’ He threw himself back against the tree. ‘Damn and blast.’
Ursula took the medallion, turning it over and over in her hand. ‘And nothing to link us to Libra, either, unless we can find a date in October that fits with Oc and Zotz. But that’s five months away, which is too long. Ki’kaame said the stone would only dare to show itself in the last weeks before the date.’ She held the medallion up, angling it into the light where the sun made honey of the bronze. There was a pause, and a sudden catch of breath.
Stella sat up.
Quietly, Ursula said, ‘Meri, when was the last time you saw a dragon facing right instead of left?’
‘Apart from every other vertical surface at Bede’s?’ He cocked his head. ‘Hardly ever. Pretty much every other dragon ever painted in the canon of European art points left, facing a knight in the left foreground.’