The men were looking at her again so she returned to her place before the brazier, looking at them with a question in her mind. Neither spoke, but the huge man pointed with his fat finger to the little pieces of bone. He wanted her to look closely at them. She did so, puzzling what it was she was supposed to see. As she puzzled, thoughts came into her head that were not her own. This was a kind of divination, she realized. They were asking the gods, who in some way were connected with their ancestors, to tell them if she was to be trusted or if she was an evil spirit.
At this she felt quite indignant. She? An evil spirit!
Her indignation cost her her concentration and the channel of their communication was temporarily lost. She intercepted an impatient look passing between the two men. She tried to be calm and concentrate again.
‘What do your ancestors say?’ she found herself asking aloud.
They frowned at her and she realized she had made a mistake to talk aloud. She tried to think the question.
The men seemed to understand. The fat one raised his great bulk from the floor and stood beside his colleague, and both looked at her with their strange slanting eyes, but no feeling of fear came to her. The look was kindly and welcoming. The ancestors must have given a favourable answer.
She was just beginning to frame another question of her own when she realized she was no longer in the room. The whole scene – room, courtyard, temple, landscape, yellow road and wall of yellow stone – was gone.
She was in darkness and she was alone.
* * * *
She was trembling uncontrollably as a kind of current thrust its path through her. She tried to keep from being afraid, knowing that fear was her worst enemy.
She tried to think the words ‘Lords of the Sun’ over and over again with all her concentration. Maal had told her to do this if she were in difficulties. It would help them to home in on her, he had said. She was not sure that this is what she wanted, but she was enough in control to know that it was not what she wanted that mattered now.
As she waited in the darkness beating out the words ‘Lords of the Sun’ over and over again, it seemed to her that the sound of the words became louder and louder until she fancied they were not in her head at all but were coming from outside. And although she could still distinguish them they were part of a greater gabble of words, most of which she did not understand. She felt she was no longer alone but in a crowd, a noisy, ebullient crowd shouting frantically for the victory of someone.
She heard the thundering noise of hooves coming towards her and she opened her eyes in terror. She was horrified to see an enormous and muscular bull approaching in a cloud of red dust, every ligament straining, steam coming from his nostrils, his eyes wild and bloodshot. She screamed and leapt back, but she need not have worried. He turned before he reached her and pounded off across a huge enclosure.
There were people all around her, people everywhere, dressed as she had never seen people dressed before. In amazement she saw women with breasts bare, flounced and flaring skirts of varied colours, bright ribbons in black hair coiled and towered upon the tops of their heads. Young men with brief skirts but otherwise bare and gleaming bodies, hair in strange curls, eyes accentuated with black paint. Old men in tunics. She stared and stared, knocked and pushed from side to side every now and again by excited people who were trying to see the sport of the bulls.
Behind one of the barricades was a raised dais and upon it such grand people sat that she was sure they must be Royalty. She had heard of kings and queens, princes and princesses, but never had she seen anything like them before. Round the Queen’s neck was jewellery of such splendour, gold and amber, combined in strings so many and so thick they appeared almost solid, amber hanging from her ears and gold snakes coiling around her arms. She was the most beautiful woman Kyra had ever seen. The king beside her, although dark and magnificent, was outshone in every way. Behind them a palace of translucent stone rose, tier upon tier against the panorama of a distant mountain range.
Someone brushed past Kyra and caused her to turn. It was a young girl not much older than Fern, almost naked, so beautiful in a healthy animal way that Kyra drew in her breath with awe. The girl looked at her and Kyra realized she was the only one in the whole throng who could see her.
Amazed, she stared into the girl’s dark eyes. She too had paint around her lids to accentuate the almond shape. Her hair was bound tight with gold ribbon so that not a thread of it dared stray.
She seemed as surprised to see Kyra as Kyra was to see her.
‘You want me?’
Kyra thought she heard the words but knew now they were only in her head.
‘I do not know,’ Kyra replied carefully. ‘I am looking for the Lords of the Sun.’
Acknowledgement and recognition flickered in the almond eyes but before she could phrase a reply a shout of such a pitch went up from the crowd all concentration was shattered and impossible. The girl moved like a young doe and leapt with the economy of an arrow to stand poised and beautiful upon the barrier wall that divided the crowd from the bull.
Kyra rushed forward and before she knew what she was doing thrust her hand out to seize the girl and pull her back to safety, but before she could do this the crowd roared again, this time with adulation, and Kyra realized the girl was the subject of their attention.
She stood magnificently poised for an instant. Her arms were raised to accept the greetings of the crowd and then she leapt and was down on the red dust with the bull.
Horrified, Kyra stared.
Like whipcord the body of the girl twisted and leapt in the most amazing way. She was dancing to the bull, challenging it with the flickering fire of her movements. For a moment he stood bemused and then could stand no more.
He charged.
Kyra’s heart nearly burst with anxiety for the girl.
But as he was upon her she seized his horns and with a graceful arcing flip she somersaulted across his back and was gone, dainty as a bird, across the other side.
The crowd went mad. Kyra thought her head would explode with the sound. Dust and noise and violence was everywhere.
Kyra shut her eyes and put her hands to her ears.
But as suddenly as it had come, it cut out.
‘Oh no!’ she cried, disappointed, and opened her eyes again. But it was too late. She was back in the ante-chamber of darkness waiting for the next part of her journey.
* * * *
She was growing used to the strangeness of the things that were happening to her by now, but could not help being a little anxious that she did not seem to be getting any nearer to the Lords of the Sun.
She started her silent but urgent chant again and this time when she opened her eyes she was in a colonnade of stone columns so huge that it seemed they would reach to the sky. She bent her head back and looked up the length of them. They were carved and spread at the top like trees and the sky was roofed out. Between them she could see further columns and beyond them dim chambers.
It seemed to her she was walking along the outer colonnade of a temple, and from her left bright and burning light shafted in to fall between the columns in stripes on the stone flags of the floor. Dimness and coolness were to her right. Beyond her at the head of the colonnade more sunlight streamed in white heat on endless plains of white sand. This must be the desert country over the sea in the far south that Maal had told her about.
Having felt the force of the sun falling through the columns, she decided to turn inwards and seek the cool depths of the Temple, but as she passed close to one of the columns she noticed that its surface was not smooth. It was marked its whole length with strange little markings and figures. As she gazed at it she was startled to come across several small representations of the figures of the half-human, half-animal demons she had seen before. She drew back in horror. Was this a temple to them?
She was just thinking she had better try and get away when a young man emerged from the darkness within the Temp
le and beckoned her.
She stared at him nervously, but was relieved to see he did not have the head of an animal. He was tall and well featured, shoulders broad, nose aquiline. The upper half of his body was bare except for a necklet of marvellous workmanship. His hair was thick and must have been mixed with something to make it stand so stiffly around his face. A band the same deep blue colour as his necklet, similarly decorated with a central eagle figure, was bound around his forehead. His feet were clad in gold sandals, the lower half of his body in folds of soft white cloth, bound with a girdle of gold.
She followed him first through colonnades of columns, then through dim chambers and even dimmer passages. At last he brought her to a halt within an inner chamber lit by torches. She stared around her and felt her old uneasiness come back as the same half-human, half-animal figures were depicted large upon the walls.
Ahead of her on a great plinth of black stone, a stone eagle stared back at her, a sun disc carved upon its forehead.
He noticed her fear and touched her arm comfortingly.
She looked at him and then looked questioningly at the dread figures around the walls. It was true she could not feel the malevolence from them she had felt before, but she could not forget the horror with which she had encountered them on other occasions.
He put his finger on her lips and another on her forehead.
His thoughts came clearly to her.
‘These are our gods,’ he said.
‘Your gods!’
He could feel the revulsion in her.
‘Why do you fear them so?’ he asked.
She thought about the other two occasions and he seemed to receive the image of it.
Gently he shook his head.
‘I was wrong,’ he said. ‘These are not our gods. They are the images of our gods.’
‘How does that explain it?’ she thought, still suspicious of the place.
He smiled.
‘There is one God, and beneath him hierarchies of spirits we call gods, but God and spirit are impossible for human minds to understand. We are too undeveloped, too primitive,’ he added.
She hoped he did not add that last epithet after looking at her. She was beginning to feel more and more like a primitive country girl of no account faced with so much grandeur and skill. He caught her thought and smiled again. She noticed that there was no condescension in his look. He liked her and respected her in spite of her crude clothes and untrained mind.
‘Having no words and images that are adequate to describe their intuitive feelings about God and the spirit world, people choose images from their own earthly experiences and use them somehow to ‘parcel up’ the feelings that they have.’
She looked puzzled.
‘Some people choose the sun and call it god, some the moon, some the king, some an animal or a bird. They know deep down when they begin that what they have chosen is only a symbol, a representation of what they really mean. But there are times when they forget that this is how it is and you will find people worshipping the image and not what it is supposed to represent.
‘My people carve a statue of a man with a jackal’s head and it is supposed to represent the spirit who guides the dead into the spirit world.
‘To some who are far along the path to enlightenment the figure in stone is no more than a signpost that points in the direction where the truth about death and the crossing from the material to the spirit world may be found. It is the sign at the entrance to a whole group of understandings. It is no more than that. They look beyond the image to the reality.
‘But to someone not so far developed, incapable of grasping subtle and abstract concepts, it is accepted as the reality itself. The worshipper stops short at the image, sees no further, may even see himself reflected back from it. The statue, the image itself, is believed to be a god.
‘The jackal’s head was chosen originally maybe because jackals are creatures of the night who seek out the dead. The human body was given to the jackal to add, symbolically, the human dimension. In one hand he carried a divine sceptre, denoting divine power, in the other the ankh, the symbol of life.
‘It is clear that death and life are contained in this one image, with the power that transforms the one into the other.
‘But when the symbol becomes downgraded into an image of a god that is taken literally, all kinds of misinterpretations of the symbolism can occur.
‘A holy image that set out to bring comfort is turned into its opposite and brings fear. The jackal head can suggest devouring nocturnal beasts preying on the dead.’
‘I understand,’ cried Kyra, ‘that makes sense.’
‘So you see the images of the gods can bring comfort and fear depending on the interpretation of the people who worship them, the same god-image can be good or evil depending on the worshipper, can bring death or life.’
Kyra frowned, trying to grasp it all.
‘Demon or kindly spirit, beast or human. Both interpretations are possible from the one image. It is we who draw the one, or the other, from deep within ourselves. That is how it is possible for men to kill and commit atrocities in the name of their god. They have forgotten the god behind the word and use the word with all its powerful connotations to excuse whatever it is they wish to do.
‘The priest who sees the jackal-god as a powerful weapon to inspire fear and keep his people cowed has brought this from within himself.
‘The priest who sees the jackal-god as a powerful but kindly guide and guardian brings this also from within himself.
‘There are no gods of stone or fire or flesh, but there are unimaginable spirit influences from the source of all that we clothe for convenience in words, in images, in stone and paint.
‘Those figures you saw as demons were figments of your own mind.’
‘But they were there – as surely as you are now.’
The young man looked at her kindly.
‘Evil influences you feared were there. You gave them the clothing of our gods.’
‘But I had never seen or heard of your gods before!’
He looked thoughtful at that.
‘It is possible someone near you knew of our gods and used them in thought form to frighten you.’
She thought about it and told him about Wardyke and Maal.
The young priest walked with her back through the Temple, passing sights of great strangeness. There was hardly a section of wall that was not covered with their weird signs and paintings. He listened quietly to all that she had to say, and when they reached a quiet shady garden with a lily pond, he motioned her to sit on a warm slab of stone.
‘I think this Wardyke has had dealings with some of our people,’ he said at last.
His face was grave and sad.
‘There is much that is wrong with our priesthood,’ he said. ‘Many have lost the insight and use the image-gods to extract blind obedience and riches from their people. Fear is a weapon they are very skilled at using.’
* * * *
Kyra knew she had found someone at last that she could ask about the Lords of the Sun.
He listened and nodded.
‘You have not been wasting your time . . . each journey you have made has been an invitation to one of the Lords of the Sun.’
‘Who are they, these Lords?’
‘I am one,’ he said, and she started back in amazement.
‘Probably you met several others. They are not pure spirits, but people who are trained amongst the priesthood in the special tasks of communication over great distances, over the whole world.’
She was shy of him now. She had thought he was some kind of trainee priest, much nearer her own level.
‘Do not be afraid of me,’ he said quietly. ‘You have come a long way to find me and I will help.’
‘What must I do?’ she asked humbly.
‘That I cannot tell you now. No, do not look so disappointed. You have found me and I will not desert you. But what Maal wanted you to do was to call
a meeting of the Lords of the Sun in your country. That you must do and we will all be there. Together we will help you. Together our powers are greater.’
‘But how do I call a meeting?’ she asked despairingly.
He looked at her with great affection. She seemed so small and vulnerable, far too young to have the burdens of her community upon her shoulders.
‘Will it,’ he said simply.
She looked puzzled.
‘Shut your eyes,’ he said patiently.
She shut her eyes.
‘Now will that the Lords of the Sun will come together to help your community.’
She squeezed her eyes tight shut and wished, as she had never wished for anything in her life, that her travels and her troubles would be over and that the Lords of the Sun would come together to help her and her people.
* * * *
The good-looking priest was gone. The huge temple of red sandstone columns was gone, the little garden surrounded by a wall painted with a scene of wild ducks and reeds was gone.
She was alone again and she was afraid.
This time it must work. She could not go on much longer.
‘Please!’ she whispered, tears pricking at the back of her eyes. ‘Please!’
* * * *
Music made her open her eyes and the scene before her staggered her imagination.
She knew that she was back in her own country, but a long way from her home. She was in the giant Sacred Circle that she had visited once before as a passenger in the mind of Maal.
It was early dawn. First light was creeping over the sky, some stars still shining in the rich blue air. A light and gossamer mist was drifting close to the ground, so that everything, even the gigantic blocks of stone that stood around the circumference in their hundreds, seemed to be floating and moving.
As she had noticed before, a high ridge of earth and grass surrounded the whole and blocked out the rest of the world. She had never seen outside this circle and could not imagine how the community who used such a great place would live.
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