‘Why is it so important where you have your burial mound?’ Karne asked. ‘What did they mean by it not doing you any good beside the trees?’
‘It is all connected with the channels through which the earth powers flow,’ Fern said. ‘Where Maal chooses to place himself at the moment of death is very important.’
‘I want my dying to be a conscious and deliberate act,’ Maal said.
Karne and Kyra looked horrified. Fern seemed to understand.
‘I have chosen this way,’ Maal said calmly.
‘I do not understand!’ Kyra cried. ‘Are you going to kill yourself?’
‘Not quite. When I know I am about to die I am going to compose myself for death, use it as I have been trained to do, to influence the direction of my journey through the spirit worlds, maybe even the time and place of my rebirth on this earth.’
Karne and Kyra were looking astonished. They had been told in ritual words many times that this life was only one of many, but until this moment neither of them had really thought about it.
‘You mean . . .?’
‘So you see it is important that he should meet his death while he is on the line of maximum life force,’ Fern interrupted eagerly, ‘so that he can have all the help he can in the difficult task of transference from one level to another.’
‘Wardyke knows this,’ Maal said, and there was a trace of bitterness in his voice, ‘and that is why he wants to move me off the line of maximum power.’
Kyra gasped.
‘We must not let him do it! We must stop him!’ Karne cried angrily.
Maal raised his hand.
‘Not so hasty, my friend. You are dealing with a very powerful magician.’
Karne was silenced for a moment and then muttered, ‘There must be a way!’
‘There will be a way,’ said Maal confidently, ‘but we will not find it when our minds are all muddied and disturbed by anger.’
‘If we sit still and let our minds flow naturally,’ Fern said, ‘the solution to the problem will probably just float up from deep inside ourselves. I have noticed that. There seems to be another “me” somewhere deeply inside that I hardly ever notice, but when I do it seems to make more sense of things than the outside “me.” I think it is this one that communicates with the plant world.’
‘Well, I am no good at sitting still,’ Karne said impatiently. ‘Things come to me when I am active!’
‘That may be your way,’ Maal said, ‘but it is not ours. Bear with us while we try to find our hidden Selves. You yourself might be surprised if you were to join with us in this.’
Silence fell between them and almost immediately the other three began to look remote and calm. Karne could not still his mind. The more he tried the more his angry thoughts churned and turned within him.
At last he could bear it no longer and burst out with the suggestion that the only way out of the situation was to kill Wardyke.
Kyra was horrified.
‘If you killed Wardyke you would be just as bad as he is,’ she said indignantly.
‘One must try to reroute . . . not to destroy,’ Maal said patiently.
‘But killing him would be re-routing him!’ Karne called out triumphantly. ‘I would re-route him straight out of this life into the next!’
Maal could not help laughing, but Kyra and Fern were even more indignant. The old priest would have preferred to change the subject, but he had to say something more to soothe the girls and prevent Karne rushing off and carrying out his hot-headed threat.
‘We are all part of the same pattern,’ he said. ‘We are dependent on each other in subtle and complicated ways and no man dare decide the fate of any other man. The mysteries of life and death are beyond our understanding and are meddled with only at our peril. By our interference we may bring about greater harm than that which we had hoped to cure. There will be ways of stopping Wardyke that do not run this risk.’
‘I wish we could think of something,’ Kyra said sadly.
‘We will,’ said Maal with conviction.
It was time for them to separate.
Maal went first as it was important that no one saw them together.
As they watched his slightly stooping figure disappear around the curve of the hill, Kyra said, ‘We are not even sure if any of this is going to happen. I may have dreamed the whole thing.’
‘I am certain it is going to happen,’ said Karne. ‘I have no doubt!’
Kyra sighed.
Her brother had always had more faith in her powers than she had herself.
Chapter 8
The Retreat
During the next few days nothing was said in the village about the changed site of Maal’s tomb, and even Karne was beginning to think Kyra’s experience might have been a dream.
They saw Wardyke once or twice but Maal had warned them to avoid him if possible and certainly not to meet his eyes. Their plan would only work if Wardyke’s suspicions were not in any way aroused. Karne helped in the fields as usual and also spent some time gathering stones for Maal’s burial chamber.
It was on the fifth day after Kyra’s experience that Faro came to the place where they were piling the rocks and asked the boys to move them towards the clump of trees. He pointed out exactly where he wanted them.
‘Why is that?’ Karne asked, trying to keep his voice as unemotional as possible.
‘I do not know,’ Faro said. ‘Thorn told me to tell you. It must be a better place for some reason.’
Karne could not wait to tell Kyra.
The other boys grumbled bitterly at the extra work involved, but Karne worked silently and as he worked he began to think of a plan. Fern’s wood was on the line of alignment from the Sacred Circle to the midsummer sunset notch. What if they dug another burial place in the woods behind her house, keeping it hidden and secret, and Maal buried himself in that instead of the official one?
He rushed home and dragged Kyra out to their meeting place near the boat. As they walked he poured out his scheme.
At first she was confused, but when she caught the gist of what he was saying her feelings were mixed. She was pleased that she had proof that she had started to ‘travel’, but she was also afraid of the implications. How soon would Maal consider she was ready to enter the circle? Surely it would be a long time before she was prepared enough for that. She had no real control yet over where she went or what she did. She remembered with a shudder that awful jerk with which she had returned to her body.
‘What do you think of it?’ Karne asked her eagerly.
‘I am frightened, Karne. What if I cannot get back?’
‘What on earth are you talking about?’ He was genuinely surprised. He thought she had been listening to every word of his excellent plan.
‘From the Lords of the Sun.’
‘Oh, them!’ he said impatiently ‘That is another problem. What do you think of my idea about the burial mound?’
He had to explain the whole thing again. She thought it was a good idea, but raised a few useful objections. The burial of a priest was always a ceremonial affair and the whole community would be there to see him go. There was no way Wardyke would let them use their own tomb.
‘Of course not! He must not even know about it.’
‘How are you going to manage it then?’
‘I am not sure. There are things I need to know from Maal’
‘What things?’
‘How long does he stay alive after the tomb is closed? If he can stay alive long enough for the crowds to leave and for us to dig him up again, it will be quite a simple matter to transfer him from the one tomb to the other. He need not start his special life transference process until we get him safely into his proper place on the alignment of power.’
Kyra thought of something else to worry about.
‘I hope he does not die before we have another priest in Wardyke’s place!’
‘I think that is why he is driving you so hard with the training. He k
nows he cannot leave until he has seen that we are safe.’
Kyra realized it was selfish of her to put up so much resistance to the training.
‘We will see him tomorrow,’ she said decisively. ‘You can take the message to Maal now and I will go home and keep mother from sending someone out to find us.’
* * * *
Maal liked Karne’s scheme and when they were once again with Fern they spent a great deal of time searching out the right place in the woods to dig the new burial chamber. He thought there would just be time enough for the move from the one tomb to the other to take place if everything went smoothly and quickly. As a priest of the Sun he was trained to control all his bodily functions himself, including breathing and blood circulation. He could so control his body that he could lie in trance without access to air or food for a long time, apparently dead.
‘Almost like a seed that lies in the ground over winter and then springs back to life when the warm weather comes?’ Fern asked.
‘Something like that,’ Maal said. ‘But I could not compete with the seed.’
‘What time of day will they have the burial,’ Karne wanted to know.
‘At sunset, so the darkness that follows swiftly upon it will be a convenience to us,’ Maal answered. ‘You must have the route well marked out so that you do not stumble or get lost. It would attract too much attention to carry torches.’
‘Try to have the ceremony on a moonlit night and we will place white marker stones to show us the way.’
‘You may not be the only ones to follow them to their source!’
‘But we need something!’
‘Rely on your own natural skills. Train your eyes. Familiarize your memory with the shapes of trees and rocks.’
‘We must go over the route several times at night,’ Karne said thoughtfully.
Kyra was worrying again.
‘It is not going to be easy to slip away from home at night.’
‘No part of it will be easy, I am afraid,’ said Maal, and this reminded him that the most important and most difficult part of all was the part Kyra had to play.
‘Come, child, we must have another lesson,’ and he led her away.
* * * *
While they were busy Karne and Fern took two sticks of equal length as sighting rods and set about trying to work out an accurate alignment from the circle to the notch. It was not as easy as they had first thought, because the trees often obscured their view, but they solved the problem at last by Karne climbing the tallest tree and Fern climbing the hill outside the wood.
Karne came down from the tree just as Fern arrived back from her work on the hill, and by swinging quickly from branch to branch he managed to land on her with a wild and frightening cry. They fell in a heap together on the mossy, spongy ground, she laughing at the fright she had suffered and he laughing at the pleasure of having frightened her. After a while they stopped laughing and lay quietly side by side, her hair spread out around her on the dark fallen leaves, like fire. They could feel the wood watching them, caring for them, being gentle with them.
‘You know,’ he said at last, sitting up, ‘it is a strange thing but there is almost a pathway, a gap in this wood opening up along the line of alignment.’
She looked where he pointed and it was true. The trees seemed to form a natural avenue, interlocked above, but at trunk level clearly grouped to suggest a kind of living tunnel leading the eye through the wood to the stone circle on the hill to the east, and to the notch on the hill in the west.
‘We need not have gone to all that trouble,’ Karne said, ‘the line was there all along.’
Fern smiled. She had enjoyed the afternoon and was not sorry they had worked it out for themselves. Karne caught the expression and smiled broadly. Yes, he had enjoyed it too.
* * * *
But while they were having a happy time poor Kyra was in trouble again. She had managed to ‘travel’ after a few false starts, but this time she found herself in a strange and horrifying situation. She was aware of her body lying on a beautiful golden couch but she was surrounded by a group of terrifying and hideous figures. Each had the body of a man clad only in a loincloth that shone like metal, and each had the head of an animal, grinning and jeering and leering at her. She tried to get up but found she could not move her body. She tried to scream, but no sound would come from her throat. She realized she was outside her body again and had no control over it. She screamed and screamed, struggled and fought. She could feel herself doing all this, but she could see her body still lying there soundless and inert as though it were dead.
The creatures began tugging at her body. She could see them doing it, but could not feel their touch. They raised her into a sitting position and pointed at something on the ground that they obviously wanted her to see. They were laughing in a ghastly way that sounded more animal than human, laughing and pointing and poking at her, anxious for her to see what they had for her. She got the impression it was some kind of present. She could see, though not with her own eyes, what appeared to be a rug. As she looked at it one of the creatures pulled at it so that it moved and what was on it became sickeningly clear to her.
The rug itself seemed not to be of skin like the ones she was accustomed to, but of woven cloth, coloured and patterned in a way she would not have thought possible. Rich crimsons and blues and golds, amazing patterning of animals and birds. But upon all this beauty lay the hideous, rotting carcass of her friend Maal.
As she recognized him she screamed and the creatures jumped about with delight.
‘Oh God! Oh God!’ she cried with all the force and concentration of her Inner Being. ‘God of Life and Light, save me!’
She could feel the words bursting in her head and even as she finished them there was a kind of explosion of light and the same snapping sound she had heard before.
She was back with the living Maal in the clearing in Fern’s wood, the creatures of evil nowhere in sight.
She was ashen and shaking and it was a long time before Maal could get a clear picture out of her as to what had happened. When he had heard the tale his face was very grave.
‘What does it mean?’ she cried. ‘Oh Maal, what does it mean!’
He was silent, his expression sombre.
‘Tell me,’ she insisted, frightened by the gloominess of his expression and his refusal to answer.
He shook his head.
She jumped up and seized him by his thin shoulders and shook him fiercely.
‘I must know,’ she shouted. ‘Tell me!’
He just kept shaking his head. Tears of frustration poured down her cheeks and she did not stop shaking his shoulders for an instant.
‘Kyra!’ shouted Karne and Fern, arriving to find what to them had been an idyllic, peaceful afternoon shattered by the fury and despair they saw before them.
Karne took hold of his hysterical sister and pulled her away from the old man. Fern put her arms about Maal and tried to comfort him, amazed that Kyra should have attacked him so.
When at last Kyra was silent, sitting pale and tear-stained within the circle of her brother’s arms, and Maal had walked away from them into the wood to think a while and returned looking calmer and more composed, Karne and Fern were told briefly what had occurred. They were both shaken and puzzled by the experience. Although Kyra would dearly have liked to ask yet again the meaning of it all, Maal offered no explanation, and she was too weary to insist on one.
‘I have decided,’ Maal said calmly. ‘The work is too dangerous for Kyra. We must abandon it.’
‘But,’ said Karne, ‘. . . Wardyke?’
‘I know. But a priest would train for years before he would take the risks I am asking Kyra to take. We cannot do it in the time available. We must try and think of another way.’
‘Who were those creatures?’ Fern asked anxiously.
Kyra sat still and quiet, showing no interest or emotion now, too worn out to care if he answered Fern’s question or not.<
br />
He paused a long time, but the expression on his face showed them that he was trying to answer.
‘What I have been doing with you is wrong,’ he said slowly at last.
Karne opened his mouth to deny it, but Maal stopped him with a gesture.
‘Yes, wrong. The world you lived in before, the world the villagers see all around them is a comfortable world. It is not the only world they live in, but it is the only world they think they live in. It fits them like their own clothes and they are happy with it. Only certain of their faculties are developed so they see only certain things about the world. Because they are not aware of anything further they are quite content that what they have is everything there is to have.
‘But there is more to reality than meets the eye of the average person.
‘There are ways of growing naturally like Fern here, or being trained like me, so that one becomes aware of some of the other levels to reality. The more one grows, the more one learns, the more complex and wonderful the world becomes, deeper and deeper levels, higher and higher levels open up to one!
‘You have started this growth with me. You will never be content again as the villagers are, with an inadequate sense of reality.
‘But there is a pace to learning, to growing, to unfolding. Fern can tell you that, from watching her plants grow and flower and fruit and fall. All should be done gradually. As one is ready so one moves. That way whatever one grows to be aware of, one is ready for. I have been pushing Kyra too far too fast. She has come upon things she is not ready for. They will destroy her mind.’
The three young people were silent.
Karne and Fern were thinking deeply upon what Maal had said.
Kyra was asleep, her head fallen upon her brother’s shoulder. As he looked down upon her face he was moved almost to tears himself at the paleness of it, the weariness and despair of it.
Chapter 9
The Training changes direction
During the next few days Kyra moved about as though she were ill. She was extremely tired all the time, and very pale. Her mother fussed and kept her close about the house. Karne watched with some anxiety but could do nothing for her. She did not seem to want to talk and indeed, even if he had wanted to call her away to their talking place at the boat, there were two reasons, apart from Kyra’s own reluctance, to prevent it: his mother’s vigilance over his sister and the presence of his two brothers, Ji and Okan, almost constantly at the boat.
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