Milo and the Dragon Cross

by Robert Jesten Upton

  “What do you think?” Milo heard Yeroen in consultation with Smith.

  “You must be inside before dawn, or the window will close,” Smith told him.

  “I know that,” Yeroen assured him condescendingly. “But how can that be accomplished? Should we dig?”

  Bori was walking over the stones, sniffing at them and apparently checking them out for recent vole activity. When he jerked his tail, Milo noticed the silent signal and went to him. He ran his hand over the surface of the stone, exploring the weathered hole Bori was showing him.

  It was shallow, but Milo knew the shape. He took the Cross out of his pocket and pressed in into the depression. It fit. Bori hopped down and the stones began to shift.

  “What? What’s this?” Yeroen called excitedly.

  “Looks like a hole,” Lute said.

  “There! There, see?” Yeroen said proudly.

  “Looks like you’ve done it,” Smith said ingratiatingly, but looked at Milo.

  A flow of cold, musty air breathed out of the void. All five contestants peered into the total darkness inside. Milo felt Stigma’s fingers wrap around his arms as she joined in. Smith was still behind the others, just behind Yeroen, and he continued to study Milo with a secret knowing smirk. Milo looked back at him, holding the contact of eyes for the moment.

  “Well, shall we go in?” Yeroen commanded to the band, but without stepping forward. There was an awkward pause as each of them waited for one of the others to take the lead, until Lute broke the standoff.

  “If you would be willing, ladies”—and he stressed the word to the group to allow the gender reference to be clear to the males present—”I’ll go first to scout the way.”

  He lowered himself into the hole, the darkness swallowing him from sight. “There’s some rubble at the beginning,” he called out, his voice echoing out of the hole, “but the passage seems to be intact. Be careful as you come in.”

  Analisa went next, and then Sarrakka. Yeroen took the next turn and helped Aulairess descend into the darkness, leaving Smith, Milo, Bori, and the invisible Stigma, who still held on to Milo’s arm, to go last.

  Smith waited. Milo locked eyes with him and waited as well. At last Smith shrugged, smiled, and slipped in. Bori hopped down next and Milo and Stigma followed.

  The silence inside was as total as the darkness. Each rustle that one of the party made was amplified by comparison and intensified the Barrow’s feeling of long abandonment.

  “Come this way,” Bori whispered to Milo. “Even if I can’t see anymore than you do with no light at all, I have other faculties.”

  Milo slipped his hand into his pocket and wrapped the Cross into his palm. He eased it out just far enough to let him glance at where his palm should be, turning it in his fingers. When the reverse side was up, he saw points of light. Each pit glowed, like the number on the face of a watch. The quadrupled star positions of The Dragon appeared, with the front two at the head glowing brighter than the others. He slipped it back into his pocket and began to shuffle forward deeper into the passage, following the brush of Bori’s tail.

  “I can’t get a light spell to work,” Lute called out from somewhere ahead. “Anyone with better luck?”

  One by one, the others confirmed the inability. “What in blazes is going on?” Yeroen demanded.

  “Our magic doesn’t work,” Aulaires responded in melodious tones. “Why not?”

  “The Barrow,” Smith said. “It absorbs your spells. Magic is useless here. The harder you try and the greater the spell, the more energy the Barrow will drain. I suggest you stop trying. It will only waste you. The Barrow was built to strip those who enter here from using the powers they have on the outside. Probably to humble them and make them receptive.”

  “But...but,” Yeroen blustered. “What’s the purpose of that? Where does it lead?”

  “To the Hub,” Milo said. “The place where time has no value.”

  “What? What!” Yeroen exclaimed. “What could you know about it, you insolent pup!”

  “More than you do, you old fool!” Smith snapped, his voice revealing his transition from the obsequious Smith to the arrogant Kayn. “Tell us, Boy, what we should do?”

  “Keep going, if you want to learn why you came here in the first place,” Milo answered. “If not, I suggest you go back right away, before the door closes.”

  “You mean, we’re trapped in here?” Aulaires asked in a diminished voice.

  “Milo? Do you know the way?” Analisa asked.

  Milo took the Cross out of his pocket and glanced at the glowing points. “More or less, I guess. Right now, we follow the passage.”

  “Then you should be our leader,” Sarakka said.

  “I agree,” Lute added.

  “That way we’ll be warned when you tumble into a pit in the floor,” Yeroen said viciously.

  Stigma squeezed Milo’s hand. “I’ll come with you,” she whispered, and Bori led the way with Milo and Stigma in the tow of his tail. They carefully passed each of the others, feeling their presence in the tunnel without actually touching, sensing the warmth of their bodies and the sounds of their breathing in the cold darkness.

  “What are we seeking, do you think,” Milo heard Yeroen say back somewhere behind him.

  “The Well of Reflection,” Kayn said. “The place where your deepest questions will be answered.”

  “I’d be happy to be able to see what I’m asking for,” Aulaires said with a shiver in her voice.

  Milo and his two companions moved forward carefully, taking the lead. “Join hands,” he called back. “We should make a chain so no one gets lost.” Bori’s tail brushed his leg and he held fast to Stigma’s hand with his right. With his left he reached back, groping the darkness until it contacted Lute’s, and closed on his callused musician’s fingers. He visualized the chain forming up behind him, each connection telling him of the next in the chain joined with the one ahead. A faint sensation of nausea hit him: Kayn linking in.

  They traveled very slowly. From time to time, Milo let go of Stigma’s hand so he could reach into his pocket to take out the Cross, peering through the dark toward the place where his hand should be. The glowing dots appeared there, suspended in nothingness. As they traveled, the earlier ones faded and the one ahead grew brighter. The progression of the bright dot was the only indication that they were making progress through the labyrinth.

  Milo noticed that Stigma’s hand was getting colder and colder. Half way through, he could feel her shiver and hear her teeth chatter.

  “Are you alright?” he asked, whispering to the place where he thought her ear might be.

  “I’m...I’m...freezing. My magic can’t ward off the cold here.”

  “Stop,” Milo called out and sounds of shuffling stilled. He let go of the hands he held and slipped out of the mistletoe smock he was wearing. If spells didn’t work inside the Barrow anyway, it wasn’t doing him any good to ward off enchantments, so it might as well serve as clothing for Stigma. He pressed it into her hands and helped her as she got her arms through the sleeves and over her shoulders. He was very aware of her bare shoulders even in the dark, as his hands brushed against smooth, chilled skin.

  “What’s going on up there?” Yeroen called. “Why have we stopped?”

  The rustlings Stigma made settling the smock onto her body stopped, and she took Milo’s hand again. He groped until he found Lute’s. “Join up,” he called and the chain linked up. Bori’s tail brushed Milo’s leg and they began to move forward again.

  It seemed like hours since they had begun to thread their way down the black labyrinth. Perhaps it had. Milo had no way of knowing the passage of time. His eyes burned from staring so hard into the impenetrable darkness, and his ears had become hypersensitive. He no longer felt afraid of what might lie around him or just ahead. The sensory deprivation became monotonous. He glanced at the Cross and saw—at last—the next point now the third from last: the hub of The Dragon. It was increasing i
n brightness, indicating its significance. That point represented the star that had once been the pole star when the Great Barrow was constructed, and Milo recognized that the Great Barrow’s shape—although he had never recognized it when he looked at the serpentine layout on the ground—was a model of The Dragon.

  Approaching the third dot, the blackness began to whiten. At first, Milo thought it was something wrong with his eyes, but then he began to actually see, like looking through milky glass.

  “The passageway is changing,” Stigma whispered.

  “It’s opening up,” Bori said. “Getting wider, and higher.”

  Milo had noticed from the beginning that the tunnel sloped slightly downward. By this time, they were probably deep beneath ground level. “Stop,” he called. “The passage is getting wider. You at the rear, move toward the left. I’ll go to the right. Let’s find out how wide it is.”

  The chain pulled out into a front. He could actually see his companions’ shapes, washed in a white light, like moonlight. Every sound they made now echoed in a new way, and as they moved forward, the two ends of the chain lost contact with the walls. They were in a cavern.

  The light seemed to glow. Tall, smoothly rounded presences stood in silence before them: stalactites and stalagmites of pearl-colored stone. Some joined together from above and below to create floor-to-ceiling columns, giving the cavern a cathedral-like look. Milo glanced to the left, seeing the other members of the party, and then right toward Stigma.

  Stigma! He could see her! She was visible within the mistletoe-stained smock. The stains glowed with opalescence, but it was the woman inside the smock that amazed him. Her moonstruck hair cascaded over her shoulders and clear down her back. Her profile was graced by a high forehead, delicate nose—thinnish—with well-formed lips, and lifted chin. Her long throat struck him as swanlike and her figure—what could be seen from inside the formless smock—was lithe and graceful. Her skin had porcelain evenness, in keeping with her moon-pale hair. As she turned to smile at him, he saw that her eyes were electric blue, large, the whites sparkling.

  “Who’s that?” Yeroen demanded.

  “Stigma, of course,” Milo replied, feeling a little light-headed as he looked at her.

  “How did she get here?” Aulaires asked.

  “She’s been here all along, only...only now you can see her.” Milo puzzled if this were an effect of the cavern, its eerie light, or its spell-absorbing qualities. He glanced past Yeroen to Kayn, at the far end of the chain. His face was twisted with a look of bitter hatred.

  “I’ve dreamed of this place,” Stigma said, her voice connected to her image for the first time and calling Milo’s attention back to her, and then the cavern that she gazed out into.

  “I’ve played it,” Lute said, and he unslung his instrument from his back.

  “This is the source,” Sarakka said. “The place where life flows out into the world.”

  “It looks sterile to me,” Yeroen grumbled.

  “Be quiet, my Lord,” Aulaires said, her voice afloat with awe. “This is Anzu’s Womb.”

  Lute loosened an arpeggio into the still air. The sound fluttered out like doves into the space, dodging in and out of the pillars to return in echoes of complex, interwoven chords as if the delicate structures of cave-stone had joined their voices with the notes of Lute’s instrument. Lute waited, his fingers poised above the strings, as the tones gradually receded. There was no magic except the magical purity of music. As the chamber returned to silence, he sent another chord out as if in reconnaissance.

  The party stood frozen in rapture as the melodiless music returned, like wind chimes or distant bells. They stood enthralled as if each of them were witnessing true magic for the very first time.

  All, that is, but one. “Let’s get on with it,” Kayn broke in, destroying the spell and fracturing the harmonics. “Somewhere out there is what we’ve all come for. Out there in that maze must be the Well of Reflection.”

  “Fan out,” Yeroen instructed, asserting leadership. “Whoever finds it first can call the others.”

  Milo watched Kayn, who was watching him. Analisa watched Milo and Stigma, who had stayed at Milo’s side with Bori.

  “I’m visible again,” Stigma said, her voice lilting in wonder. Milo decided to leave her joy intact instead of advising her that this effect was probably only temporary, due to the qualities of the Barrow. To escape Kayn’s eye, he drew her away along the wall and behind the nearest column.

  Bori spoke. “Kayn may make his move soon,” he told Milo, ignoring that Stigma heard him speak. After all, she must have heard him many times in her invisible presence. “He knows well what you’ve got and that you have it with you.”

  “The thing Milo used in the dark, right?” Stigma put in.

  “Yes,” Milo told her. “It can do things Kayn wants, and I can’t let him have it. I don’t know what he wants to do with it, but just knowing he wants it means that he wants it for no good. I can’t let him do whatever it is. I know some things about it, but I don’t know what all its properties may be. For instance, I didn’t know that it would glow in the dark and serve as a map to the labyrinth.”

  “What do you think we should do?” Milo asked Bori.

  “You and Stigma look for whatever you need to look for. I’ll guard you.”

  Milo imagined Bori accomplishing this as a lookout, like he had so many times before, even if the way he said it sounded...well, more comprehensive than that. He turned to Stigma.

  “Do you know what Kayn is talking about? This ‘Well of Reflection’ thing?”

  “No, I don’t know what it is exactly,” she said. “But in my dreams—I’ve dreamed this place my whole life!—there’s a pool. Perfectly still, except when water drips into it and sends ripples out across the surface. They wipe out the reflection you’re looking at, only, I’ve never seen what those images are in my dreams. But they tell you things. When the image gets wiped out, that’s the end of what you see.”

  “Then let’s find it,” Milo said. “Let’s be the first to find it.”

  “But...where? This chamber is a labyrinth.”

  “Your dreams...do you know where it might be.”

  “No, only that it’s here. I’m in this space”—she gestured to include the entire surroundings—”and it’s very sacred. And then I come on the pool.”

  “You said something about dripping water?”

  “Yes. It’s the drips that change the images in the pool.”

  “Listen...hear that? The drip? We follow that and we find the pool.”

  It wasn’t nearly as easy as it sounded. The sound echoed back and forth, seeming to come from there, or was it there? Or that way? Maybe over there...

  ...until they found it. The three of them stood at the edge of a still pool that had more white stalagmites rising up out of it, like the trunks of cypress trees standing in a lake. It made Milo think of the cypress trees where he had met the Crane King so long ago. The water in this underground pool was so still, so crystalline-clear, that it looked like the same place repeated just beneath the surface, only upside down. Bori crouched down to lap water from the edge of the lake, his pink tongue doubled where it sent out ripples across the surface. The upside down world fractured into dancing fragments.

  Analisa arrived. Milo saw how the two girls glanced at each other, and for the first time he saw how young Stigma really was—no older than he or Analisa. He also saw how completely different they were in their opposite types of beauty: Analisa with her dark hair and earthy immediacy, and Stigma with an ethereal look that suggested that she might rise as easily as a feather. She reminded him of the elegance of the two sisters of fairy blood, Blai and Ayuthaya. He also noted the look of pain—or maybe it was temper, mixed with disappointment or something—that crossed Analisa’s face. It made him want to tell her all the things he had thought about saying to her these many past months, and how he had worried about her.

  But this was not the time
, and he said nothing.

  He looked into the mirror of the water’s surface. It had regained it’s stillness following the ripples Bori had made. The two young women stared into the pool, too, totally absorbed in what they saw.

  Milo wondered if each of them was appraising her own appearance, Stigma after not seeing herself for so long and Analisa, probably comparing herself to Stigma. He saw his own reflection and as he stared at it, he seemed to be looking through the reflection into inestimable depths. He had a moment of vertigo as the reflected image reversed as if it were above and he was below, looking up. And in that world, there were new settings, backgrounds of places quite unlike the cathedral cavern.

  Staring beyond his own face, he saw something take form: the Dragon Cross. He was holding it. Then he wasn’t. His vertigo switched and he was looking down again, into the water, but the Dragon Cross lay at the bottom of the pool. He stooped to reach in to recover it, but stopped as the scene underneath it began to revolve, evolve, and resolve. It was as if the substance of the water were generating images in which the Cross became the central point. His vertigo returned, and this time it carried away his sense of time and place, and he looked into the open universe, launching him into this place or that, sort of like Dreaming. He knew he was looking into Otherworld, and he let himself relax into the state of the witness. Milo knew, as if from some deep well within himself, what it was he was seeing. The Cross—the Dragon Cross—was the constellation of the Dragon, and it was Heronsuge, the Guardian of The Way. Heronsuge was thus both guard of the gate and the guide to The Way. A vast constellation of Time spun around this center, and Heronsuge stood fast at its center, watching the actions of the manifest world that were, unlike him, subjects to the Rule.

  A single sound, as isolated as the toll of a bell, announced itself: a drop falling into water. The sound expanded out much faster than the ripples in the lake, but as the ripples arrived, they fragmented the reflection that he was seeing. The scene vanished and Milo was released into the measure of Time. His gaze pulled away from the pool and he looked at his companions, and the moon-bright columns of the cavern. The two women stood blinking and disoriented as if they’d awakened from a deep, deep trance.