by Kim McMahon
“Let me check it out,” he said. He knew these bikes usually had toolkits under the seats. It took him a few seconds to find the latch, but when he lifted it up, sure enough, there was an oilskin pouch with an assortment of wrenches, and some other gear including a flashlight. He bent close to examine the point where the sidecar connected to the motorcycle, shining the light and feeling around with his fingers. It seemed like there were only four bolts that he’d need to pull—although they’d obviously been there a long time and under a lot of tension, so it wouldn’t be easy.
“Well—I might be able to get it off the bike,” he said. “But it’s still only got the one wheel, on the outside. The other side would just drag on the ground—we couldn’t go anywhere except in circles.”
They all stared at it, with a familiar so close and yet so far feeling.
But then Barry said, “Hang on a second.” He stepped to the outside wheel of the sidecar, got a grip on the frame—then lifted the whole thing a few inches off the ground!
Adam was knocked out—he knew Barry was strong, but not that strong.
Barry set the sidecar down again, carefully so as not to disturb Simon.
“Okay, I think I can be the human wheel on the other side,” he said gruffly.
“Fantastic!” Artemis exclaimed. “Look, why don’t you go scope out the paths and find the best one? I’ll stay here and try to help Adam.”
Barry nodded, eager again now, and lumbered off toward the hillside.
Adam gave her the flashlight and got to work, forcing himself to be calm. First and foremost, don’t strip the bolts, he commanded himself—if that happened with even one of them, then it would take a cutting torch to do the job. He found a can of WD-40 and gave them a thorough spraying to cut the rust, and let it soak in while he went through the toolkit to find a socket and end wrench that would fit.
“Did you hear Simon talking?” Artemis asked quietly.
“I could see him, but I couldn’t hear—anything you could understand?”
“No—but I don’t think it was just babble. I actually think it might have been Gaelic. I don’t know much of that—it’s something I want to learn—but my father’s family is from Scotland, the part that used to be the old Celtic kingdom of Dalriada. Some of our relatives there still speak it, so I’ve kind of picked up the sound.”
Talking in your sleep—in Gaelic? That was wild.
But—Gaelic was the language of the Druids, right? And Rainy Jane had told them that the stones here once communicated with MaelTarna—did that figure in somehow? There seemed to be a lot of connections floating around, but he couldn’t put them together.
He started working at the bolts, fitting the socket over the heads and tapping the ratchet with the heel of his hand to get it started. Two of them loosened up pretty easily, but the other two were tougher. One of them finally gave way, at the cost of a couple of skinned knuckles, but the last one wouldn’t budge. He gazed around helplessly, wishing he could find a cheater, a long piece of pipe to slip over the ratchet for better leverage. On a ranch, there was always something like that around, but these Brits were so damned tidy that the entire area looked like it had been vacuum cleaned.
Then Simon, who still seemed out of it with his eyes closed, started muttering. It sounded like he was still carrying on an argument with whoever was there in his mind. The kids strained to hear the words—now they sounded like English, but with an accent from a much earlier time.
Suddenly he erupted, almost in a roar: “No! Free him from this shadow of menace that gathers over him! How many have I already seen led to slaughter? And now the knife twists yet again—one of my own blood has turned traitor! Do with me what you like—but I’m sickened, and I want no more part of it.” For several more seconds he was silent, as if he was listening to an answer. They stayed as still as icicles, with only a nervous glance between them—both remembering what the Goddess had said about a young knight in great danger.
Simon started talking again—growling back to the voice that only he could hear.
“Aye, perhaps he is the one, and this will be the last time—or will it? But if the heavy hand of destiny lies on him, there’s no escape from that. So be it, then—I’ll do what I can. Though it tears my heart in two, give me the strength to protect him from that snake I entrusted with my secrets.”
Simon jerked the Scotch flask to his lips so hard he looked like he was going to bite its neck off, emptied it, and hurled it clattering across the rocky ground. Maybe that woke him up—his eyes blinked open. For a few seconds, he looked confused. But then his gaze focused on Artemis and Adam, and he gave them a faint smile. If he had any memory of what he’d just said, there was no sign of it.
“How are you feeling, Simon?” Artemis said, smoothing back his hair like a mother feeling a sick child’s forehead.
“Never better, love.” But he wheezed out the words and he looked really feeble, as if his outburst had drained the little energy he had left.
He and Orpheus were very much in the same situation, Adam realized.
She turned abruptly back to Adam. “What can I do to help you?” He interpreted that correctly as a polite way of saying: Come on, the clock’s ticking—get back to work! He could only think of one thing to try with that final bolt—it increased the risk of stripping it, but he didn’t see any choice.
“I’m going to find Barry,” he said. “I need him to kick down on the wrench while I hold it in place.”
Her face took on that determined, Don’t treat me like a helpless girl, look. “I can do it perfectly well,” she said. “Just tell me how.”
Adam exhaled. He wasn’t up to arguing with her. “Stand on the seat, and when I get the socket in place, stomp your heel down on the ratchet,” he said.
“Always knew these Doc Martens would come in handy some day,” she declared, climbing up on the bike and positioning a heavy boot above the bolt.
Adam squirmed underneath it on his back and set the socket, with the handle horizontal.
“Okay—go for it,” he called up to her.
She stomped down so hard that the wrench went flying out of his hand, close enough to his face to almost take a few teeth with it.
But the bolt had turned that all-important first fraction of an inch!
“I think we got it!” he said—and he couldn’t resist adding, “Not bad—for a girl.”
“Pig,” she retorted, but she grinned down at him between her boots, and they traded thumbs up signs.
She hopped off the bike to get him the wrench, then let out a cheering hoot as Adam unscrewed the bolt and pulled it loose, with the sidecar sagging free against the motorcycle frame.
He skootched out from underneath it and eased the axle to the ground. The weight was all he could handle, even just letting it down like that—no way could he have lifted it and made it look easy, like Barry had.
“Help me hide the bike, just in case,” he said. Forlorn as this place was, you never knew if somebody might come cruising by, spot it, and get curious enough to go looking for its owner. Hiding the moped last night had probably saved his and Barry’s lives.
Even with Artemis pushing too, the big BMW was still no piece of cake, but they managed to stash it behind a well-shadowed rockpile, just as they heard the sound of Barry’s footsteps.
“I’m pretty sure we can make it,” he called as he hurried over to them.
“Right, then,” Artemis said. “Time for you to be Conan.”
Barry hefted the free end of the axle, and they rolled the sidecar clear. It looked like a pram designed by skinheads, with a huge leather-jacketed baby inside. They started across the network of narrow footpaths to the Watching Druids, with Barry snorting and straining like a Crusader warhorse, and the other two pushing. The going was tough, what with the steep slope and the rocks seeming to reach up from the ground to trip them. Artemis was doing her best, but blood was seeping through her bandage and Adam could tell that she was getting weaker.
The bouncing wasn’t helping Simon, either—he was trying not to show it, but they could see him wincing.
“Awfully sorry to be such a burden,” he rasped hoarsely.
“We’ll manage,” Adam panted. “Any particular place?”
“The tallest of the stones. It’s called Manachan, the monk.”
The entire trip only took a few minutes, but it seemed like an hour of pushing a boxcar across a field of boulders before they finally reached their destination and sank exhausted to the ground. There were about a dozen of the Watching Druid stones arranged in a rough horseshoe shape, with several others toppled over, and the rest graduating in height to the giant, westward facing Manachan at center. It was at least twice as tall as Adam, and he could see how it got its name. It had a weird, twisted shape that did look like a monk, hooded and with shrouded arms upraised as if in warning—or a curse.
“Splendid—you’re all up for medals in my book,” Simon murmured, although his wheezing sounded worse than ever. “Now, if you’ll kindly help me get me out of this contraption, I need to sit against the base of the stone.”
Careful as they tried to be, moving was obviously very painful for him—he kept up a steady stream of curses under his breath, biting them off and starting new ones before they got going full swing, although the kids could tell that they’d be very instructive about the kinds of things you didn’t learn in church. As they eased him down against the Manachan, another strange connection clicked in Adam’s mind: both Simon and Cristof had been wounded very close to the same time in this event log, if you set aside the 800 years or so of real time.
They helped Simon totter the last few steps to the Manachan, and eased him down with his back against it like he’d asked.
“I’m flying by the seat of my pants, but I learned something last night that may be crucial—or at least, I hope I did,” Simon said, talking slowly and with effort underscored by grim intensity. “Since I was a boy, I’ve studied Orpheus, trying to learn how to awaken him—working from the foundation laid by great minds like the incomparable Sir Isaac Newton, who founded The Calculus. Last night at the concert, I succeeded in that critical first step—only to have Orpheus torn away.
“After I was attacked, I don’t know exactly what happened. The man who stabbed me must have left me for dead, and in the darkness, no one else saw. I suppose I wandered off in a daze, and ended up lying in this field. Then the woman in the robe was there at my side. She gave me something to drink, that eased my pain and freshened me some. She told me that you three had what I’d lost, and where to find you—and she said to listen to the stones as they sang their ancient songs.
“After she left I lay there on the ground, waiting to find out if I’d gone mad, or was going to die, or maybe already had. But then, I did hear the stones begin to sing. What happened next, I can’t explain. Harmonics and frequencies arose in my brain, at first just as a meaningless jumble whirling around like a cloud of insects. But they started to fall into place, with mathematical relationships coming clear, and a mysterious pattern took shape. It’s not like anything I’ve ever dealt with before—it doesn’t make rational sense in any way that’s apparent, and even after I have time to examine it, I’m not sure it ever will.
“But intuition—or perhaps just desperate hope—whispers to me that it’s a way to channel an ancient energy that resonates through the Watching Druids. And it may pour enough life into Orpheus so that we can get him back on his feet—sorry, his neck—again.”
Simon fumbled in his jacket and took out a small electronic device, about the size of an iPhone, although it looked like he’d made it himself. Instead of numbers or letters on the screen, the keypad was all mathematical symbols. His long musician’s fingers started moving over them, bringing complex equations flashing across the screen.
He glanced up at the three kids, who were staring at him spellbound.
“Have a quick walk around, why don’t you?” he said. “I need to make some final adjustments—I’ll call you when we’re ready.”
They backed away, leaving him to concentrate. Weak and injured though he was, there was something about him that simply made things better—his calm brilliance, great depth of experience, and flashes of humor combined in a way that was almost magically reassuring.
Even though they knew he’d just gently warned them that failure was an option, and an all too likely one.
“This must be a very powerful spot,” Artemis said, as they walked through the restless moaning wind. “I’ve read that a major ley line runs nearby, and the ancient Celts worshipped their own persona of the Goddess here. Then the connection with MaelTarna—that’s mind-boggling.”
“Gives me the creeps,” Barry muttered, shoving his hands in his pockets and glancing nervously at the ominous, towering figure of the Manachan
“Lighten up, Barry—Simon knows what he’s doing,” Adam said.
“True,” Barry admitted.
“And I’ll tell you again, we never would have gotten here without you.”
“Absolutely,” Artemis agreed, taking the cue. “You were magnificent, carrying the sidecar like that.”
Even in the darkness, they could tell that he was blushing.
“Thanks, you guys,” he said. “But I wish you’d told me what was going on, right from the start.”
Adam sighed quietly. How to answer that? It had never occurred to either him or Artemis that Barry might become a partner in the quest to save Orpheus. They’d only worried about keeping him clueless, which hadn’t been too tough.
“We’re sorry, Barry—it all happened so fast,” Adam said. “We were just starting to get a handle on it ourselves, and then, boom! Those phony exterminators with the guns showed up, and we had to run for it.”
“Yeah, I understand. And if you hadn’t warned me, I’d be toast, so I owe you there. But from now on, keep me in the loop, okay?”
“How did you get away from them?” Artemis asked.
“I saw them out the window, like Adam said, and started downstairs to get Uncle Geoff’s shotgun, to take them on—” Then he paused, looking down and kicking the ground in embarrassment. “No, that’s a lie. I thought about it for, like, half a second, but then snuck out a back door and ran my butt off, and hid in the woods until they were gone.”
“We’d have done exactly the same thing if we’d only had the chance,” she said.
They all grinned.
Then they heard Simon call out:
“Okay, gang—it’s showtime!”
FORTY
They glanced anxiously at each other, all hit by the same thought. They’d been pumped up with elation at succeeding this far. But when you came right down to it, what you had was three kids, a pint-sized cyborg head who was down for the count, and a badly wounded man about to try a mysterious, untested process that he’d literally dreamed up.
It was suddenly very easy to suspect that they were just fools—that Orpheus was beyond hope, Simon, too, was going to die, and they’d be to blame because they hadn’t insisted on getting him medical help instead of dragging him through the countryside to end at this desolate site.
But the hand was dealt. There was nothing left to do but play it out.
“Gather in close,” Simon said, as they hurried over. They huddled down around him, Adam on one side, Artemis curled up on the other with her head on Simon’s shoulder, Barry bravely crouching in front to shield them from the wind—and Orpheus in the center, inert as a stone and the same dull color.
Simon held up his electronic device. “I developed this little gem for optimizing sound effects in concert venues. The concept is along the lines of laser night goggles, or the way bats navigate in darkness—it sends out sonic impulses and measures the response time, volume, and such as they bounce back. That allows me to draw a map, and find the best spots to station equipment.” He paused to steady his labored breathing.
“That part has gone very smoothly here,” he went on. “The old Celts were as
toundingly precise in their engineering. The other stones receive and amplify sound waves, and direct them here to the focal point of the Manachan—it’s sort of a catch basin.
“The question is whether I can get them to sing. If not, it might be months or years before they do it on their own. But that’s what I think I understood last night—a specific pattern of impulses at specific frequencies that I can send out, and it should trigger them to respond.”
“Like a computer password?” Artemis murmured, with her face still pressed against his shoulder.
“Yes, excellent analogy. Except a password is a command, and the computer obeys automatically. But this is more like a request. Even if I’ve got everything right, it’s still up to the stones—or whatever speaks through them—to decide.”
The kids got as quiet as Orpheus.
“Right, then,” Simon said. “Here we go.”
His fingers started tapping the keypad again. He paused, listening.
Nothing happened—no twitch of Orph’s face or flicker in his eyes, no sound but the moaning wind. A full minute passed, and then another.
“Maybe a miscue—I never was much of a typist,” Simon muttered. “Let’s try again.”
He did. The result was the same.
Adam closed his eyes, trying to stave off the heartbreak he felt welling up. His mind searched for a happy memory to cling to, and oddly, it took him back to Jerusalem and the chamber that Saladin had given him in the palace. He and Mustafa were lounging on the huge cushion bed, hungrily scarfing down their dinner, while Orpheus bounced around entertaining them with rambling tall tales of prehistoric adventures, battles and treachery, narrow escapes, and the countless situations he’d saved through his brilliance and derring-do. The two boys listened raptly, laughing and teasing him until he erupted in mock outrage and insulted them in return, then grinned slyly and launched into another yarn.
And somewhere during that half-dream, things started to change.
Adam was barely even aware of it at first—it just seemed that the wind was dying down, from a harsh moan to a gentle sigh. But the sigh kept shifting subtly in tone, gradually taking on a musical quality. There weren’t any actual words, at least that he could understand, and it seemed to come from voices that were human-like, but not really human.