by Peter Knyte
Table of Contents
About the Author
The Flames of Time
Copyright
DEDICATION
CONTENTS
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Map 1
Map 2
Map 3
PREFACE
CHAPTER 1 – AFRICA
CHAPTER 2 – CATHEDRAL OF STARS
CHAPTER 3 - THE CHASE
CHAPTER 4 – BEGINNINGS
CHAPTER 5 – THE PATH
CHAPTER 6 – REMAINS
CHAPTER 7 – STEPPING STONES
CHAPTER 8 - REVELATIONS
CHAPTER 9 – INSIGHT
CHAPTER 10 - AZURE
CHAPTER 11 – POINTS OF LIGHT
CHAPTER 12 – FRAGMENTS
CHAPTER 13 - DEPARTURES
CHAPTER 14 – INTO THE SUNSET
CHAPTER 15 – ENTRAPMENT
CHAPTER 16 – SIREN SONG
CHAPTER 17 – DREAMS AND VISIONS
CHAPTER 18 – TIME AND TIDE
CHAPTER 19 – SMOKE AND FIRE
CHAPTER 20 – ENDINGS AND BEGINNINGS
CHAPTER 21 – COMPLETING THE CIRCLE
CHAPTER 22 – THE HUNT
CHAPTER 23 – ANOTHER COUNTRY
CHAPTER 24 – INTO THE FLAMES
CHAPTER 25 – ASHES
If
And finally:
THROUGH GLASS DARKLY
About the Author
Peter Knyte was born and grew up in North Staffordshire, England, but now lives in West Yorkshire, where by day he passes himself off as a mild-mannered office worker, while by night he explores whole worlds of imagination as an intrepid writer.
When not tapping away at his computer he spends his time slowly transforming his garden into a Japanese style tea garden, rock climbing, snowboarding and cooking.
The Flames of Time is his first novel.
For more information about Peter and the worlds that he is exploring please visit:
www.knytewrytng.com
Forthcoming titles by Peter Knyte
The Embers of Time
The Ashes of Time
Through Glass Darkly
The Flames of Time
Peter Knyte
Copyright © 2015 Peter Knyte.
Peter Knyte asserts the right to be identified as the author of this work.
All rights reserved.
First paperback edition printed 2015 in the United States and United Kingdom
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British
Library.
Paperback ISBN: 978-0-9930874-0-0
eBook ISBN: 978-0-9930874-1-7
No part of this book shall be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means,
electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information retrieval
system without written permission of the publisher.
Published by Clandestine Books Limited
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The Flames of Time
Clandestine Books Limited
Peter Kynte
DEDICATION
For Richard Bach, J.R.R Tolkien, Robert Heinlein, Isaac Asimov, Henry Rider-Haggard, Doris Lessing, Kenneth Grahame, Robert Pirsig, and countless others for changing the way I think.
CONTENTS
Acknowledgments
Map 1 – Africa, Southern Europe, Mediterranean and near-east
Map 2 – Eastern Mediterranean, Egypt and Turkey
Map 3 – Greece, Crete and Mediterranean islands
Preface
Africa
Cathedral of Stars
The Chase
Beginnings
The Path
Remains
Stepping Stones
Revelations
Insight
Azure
Points of Light
Fragments
Departures
Into the Sunset
Entrapment
Siren Song
Dreams and Visions
Time and Tide
Smoke and Fire
Endings & Beginnings
Completing the Circle
The Hunt
Another Country
Into the Flames
Ashes
And Finally
Sample - Through Glass Darkly
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
With thanks to everyone who has over the years patiently listened to me ramble on about the creation of this novel, and then somehow still managed to find words of encouragement and enthusiasm.
Also special thanks to Jon and Tasha Williamson, Lisa Bath, Philip Hall, Claire Thompson, Jeanette Clewes, Timothy Payne and Katie Flanders for providing the invaluable feedback and proofreading of this title, which has enabled me to improve it in countless ways.
I hope I can return the favour sometime.
Map 1
East Africa, Southern Europe, Mediterranean and Near East.
Map 2
Eastern Mediterranean, Egypt, Red Sea and Turkey
Map 3
Greece, Crete and Mediterranean islands
PREFACE
I have known the man for over sixty years, and I have known his plans for almost all that time. Yet have I waited, yet have I hoped that he was lost or changed or intent upon some other purpose, and yet has some part of me known he was not.
During all that time he has been, and still is my friend. Perhaps it is because of this that I have nurtured the hopes and prayers that his insights and ideas were delusions, an eccentric blemish on an otherwise flawless character.
But now I finally know that those hopes were in fact my own delusion, my own eccentric blemish, for he has left my home not one hour ago looking barely ten years older than when I first met him in 1934.
I almost dared think I had been correct as he arrived. He stepped so slowly out of the car. The falling snow and his careful step deceiving me further, as he picked his way through the ice and slush toward my open door. But as he stepped into the light, plumes of hot breath appearing from that generous smile, I could no longer mistake the steady gaze, the powerful posture and the impossibly young face that I had last seen fifty years previously.
I realised in that moment the extent of my self-deception. That his ideas and the force of will required to manifest them were never just eccentricities, but very real, very terrible goals. Goals that he would not only achieve for his own personal benefit, but also for what he perceived to be the benefit of humanity. The first incredible step toward which was the attainment of his own physical immortality.
If necessary he would plunge the world into an abyss of chaos, that we may claw our way out and in the process be reborn transcendent, irrespective of the suffering and anguish that must surely be endured along the way.
Knowing all this, I still shook the hand that he extended, still led him to my fireside and offered him my hospitality. Still listened to his compliments upon my home and my person.
Knowing all this, I still assured him I was with him, as he told me that the time was now at hand, and that within a few short years he would initiate his plans.
Why I didn’t speak out against him, try once a
gain to dissuade or divert him from his course I cannot say.
That I must oppose him I have no doubt. Though it take more will and more life than I have left I must stop him.
I must expose his plans to the world, and in so doing expose them to the full light of day in order to unleash the horror, shock and refusal that must follow.
But to expose his plans I must expose the man, my friend. I must cause him to be known, to be hunted and finally to be destroyed.
I may already be too late.
May God forgive me for waiting so long.
Suffolk 2001
CHAPTER 1 – AFRICA
His name is Robert Marlow and we first met while I was travelling through Africa in 1934.
I was twenty-two years old in body, but I fancy, considerably more so in spirit, and although I’m told I was always a serious, or ‘adult’ child, my maturity had become all the more pronounced with the death of my father eighteen months previous.
My father was the only family I’d ever really known, my mother dying while I was still very young, and the Great War removing the only other faint traces of a family tree. So I grew up with him on the outskirts of a remote village in Shropshire, a day-pupil at the local boarding school, forever leaving my friends and travelling through the evening twilight back to the empty family home and my often distant, reclusive and resented parent.
I felt like I’d barely escaped for my university studies when he eventually died. And while I’d known his health was failing, I was still completely unprepared. With no idea what I should do with my life, and enough money not to have to think about it for a while.
The house I’d spent my whole life hating seemed bigger and emptier without my father, but I rattled around inside it for months, just going through the motions, until one day I stopped. It was as though I had no idea where I was. The house, so familiar to me, simply made no sense anymore. I knew what everything was, but didn’t understand what it was doing there or what it was for, and then gradually, I came to realise it was my own self that I didn’t understand, it was me that had no purpose or use.
In a trance I moved through all the rooms of the house in the hope of finding something that might remind me of what I was supposed to do, but there was nothing. Eventually I wound up in my father’s old room. He must have moved out of the master bedroom when my mother died, and now his things lay where he’d left them, in his attic room. Its one small window looking out over the side garden and the undulating Shropshire plain. In front of that window on the desk lay his journal with pen and ink close to hand, along with an electric table lamp for use in the evenings.
Feeling even more lost and out of place in this room which I’d entered so rarely in the past, it took me a moment to realise these things would never be used again, nobody would ever pick up this pen and write another entry in this journal, or need the light of the lamp in the evenings.
Unless. I sat down in the fading afternoon light and switched on the lamp, and then almost involuntarily, I saw my hands open the journal before me, and I began to read.
At first, it felt like a violation of his privacy, and I almost closed it and walked away. But as my eyes scanned the handwriting before me, I realised that at least in part this record was intended for me. The things he would have said to me, if he’d ever been able to shake off the loss of his wife. The entries for the last few months were a little patchy and introspective, as his health and will declined. But I continued to read, one entry at a time in reverse order, and as I did so, the sense of violation was replaced by a feeling that I not only could read these entries, but that I should read them.
Perhaps sensing his end was near, the last few weeks contained a flurry of entries, several of them referring to earlier journals, and his desire to re-read them with a view to organising and perhaps annotating them before it was too late.
I’d had no idea there were other journals, though as I thought about it I’d always known my father had kept one. Nor did it take me long to find them, all carefully bound and labelled on one shelf in the corner of our small library. It seemed natural now, after having read the most recent journal to read those that preceded it so I settled into one of the library armchairs next to the shelf of journals, selected the first and earliest journal and began.
They went back to before I was born, before my father was even married, when he had apparently become a missionary in Africa.
He’d travelled around a bit, but had eventually settled in Kenya, in a small mission ninety miles or so outside Nyrobi (Nairobi).
The penmanship in his African journals was markedly different, more eccentric and alive, obviously lacking the care and precision of his later journals. There was humour too and passion, aspects to my father’s character I’d hardly experienced. And then there was Africa, the heat and dryness, the sights and scenes of his everyday life there could not have been a greater contrast to the pleasant and safely undulating life of Shropshire.
As though to illustrate the point further, just as I was reading an entry in my father’s journal about his first experience of the torrential African rains, I heard a soft patter of rain outside the library windows. I could see nothing of the outside through the perfect black reflection in the French windows, but in a moment I had the key in my hand and they were open. The rain was coming down in the large idle drops that only ever seem to fall in the Summer, splashing across my face and hands in a half-hearted erratic fashion so different to the horrendous downpour described by my father. Somehow the sheer contrast made me come to a decision. I would go to Africa, perhaps I would retrace my father’s steps. I didn’t know, but it would be a start.
The arrangements were deceptively simple, my housekeeper and a solicitor could take care of any day to day considerations whilst I was away. My father’s journal contained a fairly complete, if dated list of travel requirements. I was even able to book passage from Portsmouth, just as he had done over thirty years earlier. The ship now stopped in a dozen more locations, but it somehow managed to ply the route in the same four and half weeks each way, four times a year. It was a brief fantasy, but for a moment I thought there might even be some of the same crew still working the route.
In what seemed moments the scent of north Africa was in the air and the bay of Gibraltar lay before me. The journey around the coast to Mombassa was like a dream. At some point I must have partially awakened from my confusion for I decided to start keeping my own journal, a naive, unfocused rambling for the first few entries, becoming gradually more direct and informative as I became accustomed to ordering my thoughts before attempting to put them down on paper.
By the time I arrived in Mombassa the writing had become a regular habit, and I remember sitting on the balcony of my hotel pen in hand, watching as the ship that had brought me there pulled out into the Indian Ocean and turned southward back the way we had come.
From Mombassa the journey to Nyrobi across the Taru desert was spectacular and fearful in its barrenness, with every inch of the train line bought in human suffering. But I did arrive in Nyrobi, and over the next eighteen months, time seems almost to have stood still. So entranced was I with the new sights and sensations, the Athi Plain and lowlands, the highlands and Great Rift Valley; a more appropriately named sight I hope never to see; and of course the elusive and ever distant Mount Kenya.
At the end of those eighteen months I was beginning to feel some guilt at my prolonged absence from England, especially with the murmurings of unrest in Europe, but my thirst for Africa was barely whetted. As such it was with a divided mind that I set out again inland from Nyrobi toward Mwanza and the southern edge of Lake Victoria, through the Eastern Rift and hopefully along the way past some Maasai villages my father had visited as a missionary.
It was after I had only been travelling for a week, putting up at a hunting lodge for the evening I was told at reception that I was not the only Englishman resident. A large party of gentlemen had been there for a few days, including several En
glish. This seemed quite a promising change, for despite running into quite a few Europeans in Africa, most seemed somehow settled, especially amongst the missionary communities. The size of this group, immediately made it sound more lively, thinking this I instantly resolved to linger for a short time should they prove amiable. With that I took myself off to my room to get refreshed before they turned up.
So it was that they found me. I was sat on the lodge’s western veranda with a tall glass of something cooling, watching the hot sun sink into a distant bank of cloud. They arrived at a good, but not hasty pace, the dying sun illuminating them in a thousand shades of flame. Fragments of conversation spilling into the growing twilight. Leaving the horses with the hotel staff, they moved toward the front of the lodge, odd individuals waiting and then forming into companionable groups before entering the lodge and leaving my sight.
I sat for a few moments wondering how long I should wait before going in to introduce myself, only half aware of the last quarter of sun, and the growing din of a thousand night-time insect voices being raised in joy.
‘It almost sounds like the night rejoicing in its dominion over the day.’ I hadn’t heard his approach, but somehow the unexpected voice hadn’t startled me, and I was able to offer my affirmation before I stood and beheld the man for the first time.
He stood in the doorway to the veranda, his travelling clothes still dusty from the ride, a tall glass of iced water in one hand. He was just slightly above average height with deep auburn hair made almost black by the dying light.