by Manda Scott
‘Cedric …’ De Aguilar was weeping openly, a thing Owen had never seen from him in life. He lifted Owen’s hand and the touch of his skin was surprisingly warm for a dead man. He said, ‘I was as fast as I could. I have been following Jack Dempsey and his brother for four months, and they following me – we played cat and mouse across the length and breadth of England. I could not leave the linen square because it would have led them to you. I lost them just before they entered the cave. I heard the blue stone cry out once, loudly. Only that brought me to you. I am so, so sorry.’
The world was beginning to sway. Straight lines became curves and the air dense as water. Owen frowned. The meaning of the words strayed into his mind and out again. He grasped at them, as at passing fish. One of them stayed. ‘Fernandez? You’re … alive?’
‘Alive and unhurt, against all my vows to protect you.’
‘I had to see if … I could … fight just once.’ He managed to grin but stopped at what it did to Fernandez. He caught another passing fish. ‘Martha?’
‘Hurt, but not badly so. I can tend her. I cannot tend you, my friend. I am so, so sorry. You should not have died now when you have achieved your life’s tasks.’
A bigger fish passed, and lingered. ‘Not … finished. Need to … finish ledgers. Must leave record for … those who come.’
‘I will finish the ledgers, I swear it. Martha will help. We will bring to pass all that you and I and Barnabas have planned. The college shall have its legacy and the world shall see the ledgers and understand them, but not while Walsingham lives. It will all be done.’
‘Thank you.’ The feeling in Owen’s fingers was leaving. His head fell back and struck the limestone, but he felt no pain. He could sense the blue heart-stone waiting for him, as if it straddled the line between life and death, and could ferry him across. His soul leaped for it, salmon-wise.
A moment’s lucency struck him. He grasped again for Fernandez’ hand. There were two of him now. Owen frowned, to bring them both into focus, and saw one of them was Martha.
Dark bruises marked the smoothness of her face and she was bleeding on to her shift. He wanted to say how to heal her and could not. Instead, he said, ‘Sell the diamonds … for you. Make your … daughter … a wealthy woman.’
‘She shall be. In your name shall the Walkers keep open the trackways. I swear it. Goodbye, my friend. Do not forget me where you travel; I would meet with you again if we may.’
Owen could not speak. He felt a warm hand on his brow and fingers on his eyelids that made the world black and gave him peace, so that he could turn now and see a chalk-riven hillside, on which waited an arc of colour, and four beasts becoming one.
Najakmul was there, glorious in her majesty, as she had promised she would be. She swept open her arms and there came a rush of welcome and choice and one final request.
34
Weyland’s Smithy, Oxfordshire, 5:12 a.m. 21 June 2007
THE TUNNEL INTO the grave mound was not long. It did not muffle the noises from the clearing outside; the sounds of men in conflict flowed in on a liquid bed of birdsong.
Another shot rang out, and another. The part of Stella that could still think clearly knew that Gordon Fraser was free now to follow her. That same part grieved for Kit, even while the rest held the blue stone and knew that he had made the right choice where she had not; that it mattered more than her life or his for the stone to be in the heart of the earth at the sun’s rise.
There was no time properly to grieve. The sun spread gold across the eastern line of the earth. From inside the true black dark of the mound, she could feel it. The song of the stone was the song of the birds and they reached for the same rising point. She could count the time in heartbeats.
At the tunnel’s end was a fire, with shadowy figures about it. One was clearer than the rest: a lean man with a quirked smile and gold in his ear. Bowing, he said, ‘My lady, we who care for you are here as guardians, but we cannot guard for long. The place is known to you. Will you set the stone into it?’ He bore a sword that she recognized in his one hand. She looked for a medallion about his neck but did not see it.
Words burned across her mind, written long ago, to bring her to this place. She spoke them aloud: ‘Follow the path that is herein shewn and be with me at the time and place appointed. Do then as the guardians of night foretell. Thereafter, follow your heart and mine, for these are one and the same. Do not fail me, for in doing so, you fail yourself, and all the worlds of waiting.’
‘Indeed.’ His smile was that of a god, free of all worldly care. His earring was a pearl of sunlight, sent to guide and guard her.
A recess in the back wall glowed with a blue light all its own. With too-slow fingers, Stella fumbled the heart-stone to the lip of stone and the recess that had been made for it at the dawn of time. There was no warning from it now, no push, no flashes of colour in her mind, only a need that went beyond words. It was a lover and the mound the beloved, waiting, yearning. She was the one who held back a moment, simply for the ecstasy of it.
Behind her, a figure of flesh and leaking blood blocked the entrance to the tunnel.
A voice she had never heard before spoke from the earth, saying, Do not delay.
Stella Cody stepped over the fire and lowered the stone that bore her own face down to the place that had waited for over five thousand years.
The gunshot came afterwards, or before, she could not tell which, only that her world exploded in damaged flesh and blue light and a bluer, harder pain.
She was blinded a moment by the fire and the glow of a man’s earring, and Gordon Fraser was there, looking dazed, and an old man with the skin of an oak tree and a nose like a ship’s prow who stood with his staff raised in summoning, and so they were all dead together, which explained why she saw the dragon of the winter snows rise up from the side of Uffington hill and unfurl its wings and tip back its head and roar out its yearning to turn back the tide of all evil and save the world from ruin.
And yet, it could not fly; only eight colours made its form. The sky blue of the heart-stone was missing.
Stella looked down. In the lands of the dead, she carried the stone, as she had in life. Here, the stone was more alive than she, vibrant in ways she had felt before, but never seen.
On the hillside, twelve people stood in an arc about the dragon. At their head, the old man crowned by reindeer horns, whose face she knew. Ki’kaame said, ‘Will you join us, last of the keepers, and return the heart of the earth?’
‘Of course.’ She was already walking.
From the other half of her heart, faintly, Kit said, ‘Stell? Please don’t go.’
Stella stopped. Ki’kaame stopped.
The air parted and came together again. To her left, where there had been only the dragon, was also a man of medium height with silvered hair. The medallion about his neck was the image of hers. His smile was old as time, and as wise. He looked exactly like her grandfather.
He said, ‘You are the latest and the youngest. Your life has not been shaped for this. If you wish, I will take the stone to the heart of the dragon. You have that choice.’
The dragon called to her once, with all the yearning of the stone. From another, less bright, place, Kit’s voice whispered, ‘Stella?’
‘Kit.’ The word came from the depths of her soul, an answer and a choosing.
Already the cold was inside her, welling upwards.
‘Thank you. We have followed our hearts, you and I. There must always be love, as well as duty.’ Cedric Owen reached for her and for the skull together. His hand was a clear sky blue.
In the core of Stella’s heart, a fist of ice met the song of the blue stone. Her world exploded into shards of blue and black and scarlet.
‘Stell?’
She was in sunlight, lying on grass with birdsong quiet around. Her shoulder was on fire.
Kit was leaning over her. His face was a kaleidoscope of grief and wonder.
‘Stell. God, Ste
ll …’
With both arms, he lifted her. The pain in her shoulder was blinding, so that she was slow to understand.
‘You’re whole!’ she said presently, in wonder. ‘You can walk.’ He was walking, carrying her to a place where the sun fell on the short grass.
He said, ‘And you’re alive.’
His smile was a lopsided thing, not fit for such a dawn. He tried again and it was even, both sides the same. He said, ‘You’ve been shot, but the bleeding’s stopped, and the hole’s not a hole any more. And your medallion has changed.’
He lifted it up. On the flat surface was a dragon alone, with no man to raise it. On the other side, the scales that balanced sun and moon had gone.
Unsteadily, he said, ‘As a scientist, I’d rather not ask how this happened.’ And then, because she needed to know and could not make the words, ‘Gordon Fraser’s dead; Tony got the gun and shot him. Davy’s cracked his arm, but otherwise he’s OK.’
‘Ursula?’
‘We don’t know yet. Davy’s calling the hospital.’
She let Kit help her to sitting. The mound was the same as it had always been, but that the stones were not singing.
She said, ‘Thereafter, follow your heart and mine, for these are one and the same. Cedric Owen was there. He gave me the choice. I followed my heart. I came back to you.’
‘I felt you do it. I can’t tell you how glad I am.’
In a daze of pain and sunshine, she held his hand. ‘Do not fail me, for in doing so, you fail yourself, and all the worlds of waiting. I don’t know what the worlds are waiting for, but we didn’t fail, either of us.’
Kit smiled again, and the world lit bright and was perfect. ‘I know.’
EPILOGUE
To Professor Sir Barnabas Tythe, Master of Bede’s College, Cambridge, greetings.
Sir – My thanks for your kind letter and the gift of pearls sent to our daughter Frances Elizabeth on the occasion of her Christening. She thrives but is peaceful, as she has been since her birth. Martha, too, is thriving and once again managing the farm. We have completed the writing project that was our joint concern and the results are sealed as we have agreed to be opened at a time long hence. I have deposited a letter with your lawyer in Oxford as you suggested.
There remains nothing outstanding, except only our deceased friend requested that you be given the enclosed, which I trust finds you in good health. If sold, it should, I believe, generate approximately £100 for it is unflawed and of good cut. If you wish to have it divided, I know of a man in Sluis whom you may wish to contact in that regard. He has regular contact with Harwich and was known to milord Walsingham before his untimely death last month, for which we all, of course, have offered our sympathies to the family and to the Queen.
I trust this finds you in good health and that you and your college continue to prosper.
Yours, etc.
Francis Walker esq. Written this tenth day of May, in the year of Our Lord, Fifteen Hundred and Ninety, at the farm of Lower Hayworth, Oxford-Shire.
Translated from the Elizabethan by Anthony Bookless and Ursula Walker, in their New Comprehensive Biography of Cedric Owen, Cambridge University Press, 1972. Excerpts available on line at www.bedescambridge.ac.uk
POSTSCRIPT
It is with great regret that the Master and Fellows of St Bede’s College, Cambridge, announce the death of Professor Gordon Fraser after a short illness. At his own request, his body was cremated and the ashes were scattered into the Gaping Ghyll pothole on Ingleborough Hill in the Yorkshire Dales.
A service of remembrance, open to all current and former members of the college, will be held in Bede’s chapel on Friday 3 August 2007, to which you are cordially invited. Donations should be sent to the Bursar.
Signed, Sir Anthony Bookless MA PhD OBE, Master, Bede’s College, Cambridge.
Davy, Ursula, can you come? Stella will be out of hospital. Tony will be able to take time off after the ceremonies. It would be good to see you. And Jess is here. She wants to meet. Let me know, Kit.
THE END
AUTHOR’S NOTE
I am writing and you are reading in the ‘end times’, the period in which a man-made catastrophe assails the world.
The translations of the Dresden Codex are disputed in their detail, but the broad picture is widely accepted: that the ancient Maya, a race of quite astonishingly accomplished astronomer/mathematicians, whose culture flourished from AD 200 to 900, nevertheless set their calendar with a ‘zero date’ of 11 August 3114 BC, in order that it might reach its end date of 13 Baktun (roughly 5,125 of our years) on 21 December 2012.
This is the date when the winter solstice sun returns to its full conjunction with the galactic centre, the dark rift in the centre of the Milky Way. We name this place 28 degrees of Sagittarius. For the Maya, it was Xibalba be, the Road to the Underworld, considered to be the womb of the galaxy.
Thus they set their calendar to mark the moment when the sun dies and is reborn from the galactic womb – an event which happens only once every 26,000 years. For the Maya, it represented the end of the fifth and final cycle of human existence.
A whole body of myths, prophecies and legends surrounds this time, not only of Mayan origin. If Geoff Stray is right (see Beyond 2012 in the bibliography), the I Ching can be read as a lunar calendar which also indicates an ending – or a transformation in consciousness so vast that it might seem like an ending – in 2012. Others have found similar references in Vedic and Egyptian traditions and yet others link the associated Venus/Pleiades alignments with Christian or Judaic theology and the promise of Armageddon.
Among all of the plethora of myths and legends surrounding the 2012 end-date, those relating to the crystal skulls are the most colourful – and they are pale artifice compared to the real thing.
This book grew from the astonishing, beautiful, compelling, and inspiring life-sized crystal skull that is on display in the British Museum. It sits in a quiet corner of the main gallery opposite a particularly moving statue of a boy on a horse (whose story I will write one day). Whatever you wish to believe of the skull’s origins and purpose, it is impossible not to be struck silent in its presence.
Of the many accounts of its creation, the ones I have chosen to nurture are those which say it was birthed in the pyramids of the Maya, and that it is one of a series of thirteen which, when brought together, will either avert the end of the world, or provide us with the means to transcend it.
Whoever made it and when, the skull is a piece of extraordinary craftsmanship. To carve a fully life-sized skull with such a degree of anatomical accuracy from a single piece of crystal is, even by modern standards, a gargantuan task. If it was genuinely made in Mayan times, by polishing raw crystal with ever-decreasing grades of sand, knowing that any mistake would destroy generations of work, it is exceptional.
The Museum skull is not alone. The best known of the others is the Mitchell-Hedges skull which is kept in Canada. Like Cedric Owen’s blue heart-stone, this skull was carved from a single piece of solid crystal, with a hinged mandible and the ability to take light up through the occiput and focus it out through the eyes.
Facial reconstructions have been made of this and other skulls, showing faces from a range of readily recognizable racial types. All of these skulls are said to have a solid, calm, quiet presence and to change the lives of those they touch. (For a more detailed description see The Mystery of the Crystal Skulls by Chris Morton and Ceri Louise Thomas.)
Those, then, are the two foundations of this novel: the 2012 end-date and the legends of the thirteen skulls. For the novel’s history, I have woven my fiction around pillars of known fact: the reign of Bloody Mary Tudor did reach its nadir in the spring of 1556, when Thomas Cranmer, former Archbishop of Canterbury, was burned at the stake.
In June of that same year, Catherine de’ Medici, the much-traduced Queen of France, gave birth to twins, one of which died within days while the other survived to mid-August. Michel de
Nostradame, better known as Nostradamus, and renowned for his skills as a physician, was summoned to court in the summer and was present around the time of the death of the second twin.
History does not record the reason for the summoning but it doesn’t seem to me to be too much of a stretch of the imagination to link him to the Queen’s need for a new and better physician to save the life of her child.
This was a time of massive developments in medicine, although in the western nations surgeons – as opposed to the university-educated physicians – were considered little better than butchers.
By contrast, the Arabic and Moorish worlds had textbooks going back centuries that detailed intricate surgical techniques, together with an understanding of anaesthetics that permitted them to take place. As a former anaesthetist, I could easily become lost in the descriptions of amputations, mastectomies and enucleations and wonder at the skills of those who went before, while lamenting that our insane cultural blindness led them to be ignored for centuries as unclean and unworthy. As a writer, I have endeavoured to bring life to the texts without becoming overly technical.
The remaining characters are largely fictional, although Fernandez de Aguilar’s putative ancestor Geronimo de Aguilar was taken captive by the natives, along with Gonzalo de Guerrero, in 1511. The latter did defect to the Maya and led a longstanding resistance on behalf of his new people against the Spanish invaders until his death in battle in 1535. De Aguilar never gave his heart to his captors. He escaped in 1519 and joined Cortés’ expeditionary forces as an interpreter. In later life, he settled and married a native woman. He did not make his fortune selling sisal rope to Europe, but a great many of his successors did exactly that from their estancias in what are now Mexican lands.
* * *
In terms of location, Zama is now named Tulum, but the temples and the walls remain. The view of the dawn from the top of the temple/lighthouse is exceptional.