Time Knot

by M. C. Morison

  Anastasia pouted. Devorah huffed. Nysa wondered how much oil Angelos put on his hair to keep its tight curls from rioting. They entered the serenity of the Palace Library.

  A bald-headed man, with robes like a priest and dark lines of kohl under his eyes, came over to them. Angelos greeted him with deep respect and introduced the girls by their name and their family. I’d no idea he’d noticed me, thought Nysa, let alone knew who I am. The Curator regarded each of them in turn. He held Nysa’s eyes for so long she felt a flush of embarrassment spread through her and looked down. When she caught her friends’ eyes they were giving her an odd look.

  “Our Library isn’t like the main one. Its collection has a quite different purpose. You’ll see it’s laid out in an unusual way. This is where people read.” He indicated benches and tables set between a curving Library wall and the windowed inside walls of the colonnade. “We collect the documents for them. They are never removed from the island. Their words are all sacred. Here rests the history of all mankind. Here are the Revelations of the Gods. Come.”

  He beckoned to Nysa and her friends but as he turned, indicated to Angelos he should remain by the door with Alexander’s sword. In front of them, a fresco painted on smooth curving plaster showed maidens dancing with the God Apollo. The Muses! The creative spirits behind all writing.

  The Curator led them to the left where the fresco on one side and the curving wall on the other carried recesses holding rolls wrapped in cloth. Under each separate recess a geometric shape, some Greek letters and a number, offered a filing system Nysa couldn’t quickly grasp. They moved slowly between the curving rows of papyrus rolls in their little cubbyholes. On their right an opening led into an inner concentric circle with further storage. They walked past that opening and several more. Light filtered through from a raised cupola high in the roof. Just above the head of the Curator, unlit lamps hung on long chains from the ceiling far above. As Nysa’s eyes adjusted to the muted daylight, she could read the codes for each document.

  Every entranceway to the inner circle had wooden columns with painted hieroglyphs. Nysa had learned some of this antique picture writing and loved its mystery and beauty. But the pictograms had a random appearance to her. They entered the next storage circle, turned right, passed by a couple more entrances, and turned left into a circle even deeper in the library. Nysa had no idea now where she stood in relation to the entrance with the sword.

  “Walk down there,” said the man.

  The three girls followed his directions and soon came to a wall, with a painting of a god with the head of a bird.

  “Who’s that?” asked Anastasia.

  “Thoth,” said Nysa, “the god of writing and learning. My father says he is similar to the Greek Hermes.”

  “We’d best go back,” said Devorah.

  When they retraced their steps the Curator had gone. The girls stopped.

  “Which way should we go?” asked Nysa, sensing the other girls somehow knew more than she did.

  “I don’t know,” said Anastasia.

  “Surely this is a labyrinth,” said Devorah, “designed to confuse.”

  “Well, we came this way, didn’t we?” said Nysa. She looked at her friends and they nodded. They continued forward, passing openings on both sides.

  “I think we turned here.” Nysa peered between the columns giving access to the wider circle on their right. “Shall we try?”

  Anastasia shrugged. Devorah coughed, and dust swirled about them where they’d brushed against some of the cloths wrapped around the scrolls. Nysa led the way and soon met a transverse wall bearing scrolls and entirely blocking their progress.

  “Other way then.”

  They went back the other way, passing the entrance they’d just come through and continuing on. No opening gave access to the outer circle before they met another block.

  “We have to go back,” said Anastasia, “don’t we?”

  They did. Nysa could feel a slow nervousness creeping through her limbs, like footprints left by ants made of ice. She couldn’t see how they could be lost. Even if the Library was indeed a maze it had to be fairly simple.

  “Knowledge is like that,” said the Curator, who now stood behind them. “It is so easy to get lost amid all the opinions and the shouting in the market place. Only the pure in heart can find their way in this Library and only the pure in soul can plumb its depths.”

  Some of the storage areas must slide. That’s how he ended up behind us in a corridor we’d just walked down, thought Nysa.

  “Come, I’ll show you something.”

  He walked on purposefully, turning this way and that, sometimes in an outer circle, sometimes in the inner ones. The shelving went high and although Nysa thought she might be able to climb it, the top part rose smoothly, with no handholds.

  They reached the centre. Light reflected in a corona above them, high in the domed roof. A bull, with a sun disk between its horns, dominated the centre of the Library. The Curator pointed up.

  “Our dome, built with the same wisdom that enabled the beauty of the Pantheon in Rome. We have light for our work, but no rain.”

  In front of the life-size bull, made entirely of bronze and very detailed, a small offertory table held flowers and a brass cup with a cover full of holes, from which the smoke of a gentle incense rose heavenward.

  “The Apis bull protects our labyrinth even as the Minotaur protected the labyrinth of Crete.” A thin smile spread along the Curator’s mouth. “Don’t worry, we’re not sacrificing any virgins today.”

  Nysa shuddered. Devorah let out a snort and coughed some more.

  “Come.”

  The Curator led them down a narrow passageway that carried no scrolls. The plaster walls on either side had Egyptian writing and pictures of many of the Gods. At the far end, on either side of a stone doorway flanked by pylons running up close to the ceiling, were pictures of a goddess with wings outstretched, with a feather in her headband. Above the door a winged sun disk rose above the sinuous curves of two snakes facing outwards in each direction.

  “We call this room the Temple of Truth. Only those true to themselves can find their way in and find their way out again. Our bull is as protective as the Minotaur, over the learning hidden here.”

  Nysa peeked in. The room, lit by four suspended lamps, had carvings in low relief all around. Figures waded through water, their clothing rendered both wet and dry with the mason’s chisel, with an artistry that took her breath away. A central round pillar partially blocked the carvings on the far side. Some incised symbols had been highlighted in colour. The room held an extraordinary peace, the stillness found at the centre of a spiral.

  “Those who find their way here uninvited, never leave. It is our joy and our duty to protect that which the Gods have given. Those who built this Library knew that. We have a sacred trust that must not be broken.”

  The curator let the girls look into the room for some moments longer. Nysa thought she heard something like a sigh, deep, deep below the stone floor, as though somewhere in the rock nearer sea level a god of the underworld turned in sleep. She tried to open her mind to the words that might live in that sigh.

  ‘BEWARE,’ whispered the soundless voice. A voice older than Alexandria. A voice older than Egypt.

  “Come on, Nysa, we’re leaving,” said Devorah. “Unless you want to stay here all day.”

  The Curator had already started the journey back through the long passageway towards the sun-bearing horns of the bull at the centre.

  She followed the other girls out, turning this way and that. A path too complex to easily remember.

  “Do you want a fig?” asked Angelos, sitting on the step of the entrance to the library.

  Time Dance

  Nysa continued down the colonnade with her friends and they entered a further large room some way beyond the library. High above their heads the ceiling carried traditional Egyptian decorations. The floor had been laid with pale rose marble slabs
. Light came from rows of highly placed windows, shielded from the bright sun by the roof overhang. The cool clear atmosphere of the room enveloped Nysa and she could feel the resonating peace that a place gathers from being used for years for sacred ceremonial. A buzz of voices greeted them. Boys and girls of Nysa’s age and older were chatting and some watched as men erected a structure of poles on the side of the room closest to the sea. Near them, a large irregular object the size of a cow or bull lay swathed in cloth.

  “Gather around,” said Hypatia.

  They did, sitting in a large circle as the Lady gracefully perched on a low stool that one of the older boys had offered to her. Myrna sat on a marble bench on the far side of the room.

  “Some of you have been here before and for some it’s your first time. You all know that the great sage Pythagoras taught ‘all is number’. I’ve told you this many times. We see it in the coiling of the snail shell, in the placement of the leaves of plants, in the rhythms of the Moon and the Sun and in every aspect of these beautiful bodies gifted to us by the Gods for our time on this celestial sphere on which we dwell.”

  As she spoke the men continued to build whatever they were constructing with their poles and rope. They worked swiftly and quietly and had obviously done this before. Above them, high up, other men were standing outside one of the windows on a walkway. They were working with something metallic, which flashed golden in the sunlight every now and again.

  Hypatia was pointing to the floor.

  “See where the craftsmen who made this wonderful room incised our floor with the universal numbers of creation.”

  She stood up and borrowed a thin, straight stick from the same boy who’d provided her stool. Walking within the circle formed by her young audience, she pointed out the geometric designs on the floor. Fine grooves had been cut and pale-coloured dyes marked their course in curves and straight lines. Hypatia spoke of how a single point becomes a line and a line a triangle or square, and how the square evolves into the pentagram. As she spoke, the point of her cane flicked first to a line and then to a shape picked out on the surface of the marble.

  “When we dance in here, we animate the Numbers of Creation, we stir the Currents of Time itself. That is the importance of sacred dance. Some of you have been evoking the movements of the celestial spheres for several years, and some of you are just coming fresh to this.” She looked to where Nysa sat with Anastasia and Devorah, and smiled. “This work – for it is indeed work – is of the highest importance. These are dangerous and difficult times when the most holy and delicate of truths are in danger of being lost.”

  For a few long moments, Hypatia looked around her at the shapes on the floor. She’s seeing into the future. Nysa frowned and blinked. How do I know that?

  ‘Because it is true,’ came the thought within. Nysa glanced over to where Myrna sat bathed in the pink reflected light from the floor. The mute slave girl winked.

  “Today I’m going to share something new to all of you,” said the Alexandrian woman. She gently eased her way down onto the stool and arranged her skirts around her. She placed the cane at her feet.

  “Nine years ago, to the day, I had a vision. I’d been fasting and living in our Temple of Isis for almost a month. Each night I reached out to the stars, seeking wisdom from the Gods who animate those great constellations. The spirit of Athena drew close.”

  She looked over to the boy who assisted her.

  “I did not see Her, Angelos, no one can see a God. But I knew She had drawn close. I fell asleep.”

  The boy nodded. Nysa wondered if this answered a question he’d once asked.

  Hypatia spoke of her dream and how it had been as real, if not more real, than her normal everyday life. A deer had approached her and led her into a grove of trees. There, three maidens danced and sang, whilst others played lyres and beat tambours. The spring near to where they danced sparkled with sunlight, and these reflected beams the three dancers caught and wove. At first the light beams glowed and vanished, but gradually, as they danced, a shape appeared, a shape beautiful in its simplicity yet full of life. A shape that the dancers span into a key to life. Gradually the dancers withdrew and the shape moved on its own between the women in their pale gowns. As it slowly revolved, crystalline forms appeared, and flowed, and scintillated within it: pyramidions, cubes, spheres faceted with hexagrams…

  Nysa could see Hypatia’s grove and the shape. The glowing structure of light pulsed with inner forms. She knew they were the ones spoken of by Euclid and the ancient Greeks; some appeared made of fire and others made of water. They flowed in and out of each other like gentle breaths. Their inner dance made the outer shape, which looped in a folded circle that Nysa couldn’t quite understand. For a moment the grove vanished and Nysa floated within and beyond this flowing stream of light as it wound its way throughout space, embracing stars and constellations in its dance.

  Gradually it all vanished. The others in the room were talking quietly and the men had completed the structure they were building. Hypatia walked past her and briefly placed her hand on Nysa’s shoulder.

  ‘You saw. You know. Hold the Secret close. It is dear to Isis.’

  Nysa didn’t know if it was the Lady who had spoken or Myrna. The room, still and moving at the same time, no longer felt completely solid, as though, if she tried hard enough, Nysa could see through its walls.

  A dazzling shaft of light poured into where they sat, lighting up a wide rose-coloured circle on the floor. The three or four boys and girls caught in the brilliance moved away. Hypatia walked over to the men and carefully removed the cloth covering from the object. Built in metal – Nysa guessed bronze of some sort – the shape, made of a gleaming curved rod, formed an exact replica of the folded line of woven light Nysa had seen with her inner eyes. The men attached thin cables that disappeared up into the gloom near the ceiling. Gradually three other men pulling near the wall caused the metal structure to rise in the air. Hypatia guided it at first and then men standing on the platform of poles moved it so it did not swing wildly. Bit by bit it rose until, with blinding flashes, it caught the sunlight reflected in through the high window.

  “See,” said Hypatia. “In mathematics this is called a knot. This is the Time Knot.”

  She pointed with the long stick at the sharp shadow cast in the oval of light on the pink marble floor. As the men moved the shape above them, the shadow produced flowing shapes, as though dark snakes chased each other across the cold stone floor. Nysa caught her breath as the floor came to life. The shadow movement dissolved its solidity. Nysa could see into and through the marble. Pictures, forms, songs unsung, poems not yet dreamed by poets all played just below the surface.

  “Watch the shapes, girls, watch. Let them seep into your heart, your stomach, your blood and bones. They are the very shapes of life. They are to enlighten, not mesmerise. You will know their meaning only when you dance them.”

  At some point – Nysa could not tell minutes or hours, for time had vanished – the boys started playing music on instruments they’d placed earlier at the sides of the room. The acoustics were wonderful. The sounds – drumming, fluting, strumming – flowed like the shadow snakes, while the gleaming bronze Time Knot slowly rotating above them.

  Nysa stood and danced. Anastasia and Devorah joined her. The other girls span slowly in a weaving, dipping, rhythmic circle around them. The music led the dance; the dancing led the music; and the Time Knot guided them all with its celestial shapes.

  “Fight, You Boys, Fight.”

  Sweden – about 1520

  It took three days riding for us to reach the end of the lake. Another three days and we were in a landscape of fir trees and pure snow. The hunters stopped at a lodge where we slept one night in the warm. They would stay here and trap furry beasties. We would go north. I couldn’t believe that I felt sad to say goodbye to my pony. Baldur – for that was the name he answered to – enjoyed being in the lead. He pushed to the front, even though my rid
ing skills were by far the least accomplished in the group. No one seemed to mind. Baldur had a knack of finding the right way to go.

  Now we carried small packs on our backs. The skis were very long and narrow: made of wood, they had upturned ends and rather lovely carvings. My boots were strapped in. No safety catch! Best not to fall over.

  Signy had a map drawn on a piece of cloth that she kept with great care in her jacket. She knew the villages to visit and the ones to avoid. In the summer both she and Brother Niels had travelled in these parts looking for certain rare berries and flowers. In the first few days we often slept where Håkan’s mother was known and respected. She’d sewn various small pieces of jewellery into her skirts and used these on occasion to buy provisions for us. Both she and Håkan had some valuable coins. They discussed accounts some evenings, very quietly. I wondered how long we could manage to pay for all our food. On two occasions Signy persuaded a farmer to take us on his sled, when the roads were good enough. My legs, much tougher now, enjoyed the rest. The cold continued to sit inside my bones. I’d never felt really warm since my dip in the lake.

  As we headed north the days became shorter once again and, if possible, colder. I couldn’t get either Håkan or Signy to explain why we were going so far north. Something about a drum skin, that didn’t make sense to me. We now felt quite safe from the Danish soldiers. That is, until we saw the scarecrow in the tree.

  We’d left at dawn from a village where we’d slept near the fire in a large homestead, with dogs and chickens snuffling and clucking around us. I’d ceased to worry about smelling like old football socks days ago. I caught the powerful whiff of the others once in a while, and when dogs stopped barking at us they would sniff everywhere as though we were olfactory entertainment. I don’t think anyone washed more than their face and hands in the winter months. Having a … going to do a number two, when you have to break the ice in the privy just to get inside, became an activity best avoided as long as possible. There never was a happy ending, and definitely no puppy-soft loo paper.