The Silver Vortex

Chapter 1-2

Drifting between sleep and waking, Lark caught the shadow in Isar’s eyes and touched his lips with her fingers. She couldn’t speak but she could communicate with her hands, her eyes and her thoughts, and she had taught Isar that tongue-talk is only a very small part of the human dialogue. But Isar needed to use word-sound this morning, he needed to push out into the open what he was feeling. He needed to rid himself of the strange, haunting mix of emotions he had always had regarding Wardyke... As he talked Lark listened quietly, fascinated — her intent grey-blue eyes never leaving her husband’s face, seeing how he wavered between the love and loyalty of the distant past and the revulsion Wardyke had generated more recently. She saw an image of the man, tall and lean, with dark and penetrating eyes, aquiline nose, sharp and determined chin. The image was so clear in her mind’s eye she wondered for a moment if he were really there, in the chamber, watching them. She shuddered and buried her face against Isar’s shoulder. She prayed that the old chain was well and truly broken and that Wardyke would never again return to interfere in Isar’s life. With Guiron far away, Wardyke dead and Deva apparently happily married to Gya, it had seemed as though Isar was free at last to live a new life — but now, she wondered...

* * * *

Kyra was already in the Temple when the first light came. She too had sensed the stirring of an old danger and was preparing to combat it in the most effective way she knew — by calling on the help of the spirit-realms, by gathering strength from her peers across the world and across time. Khu-ren, her husband and High Priest of the Temple, was not with her. He had celebrated the turn into spring with them — the moment when the sap begins to rise and the travelling birds return — and was now on a progress through the land, visiting other communities, encouraging and strengthening bonds with the mother Temple, and making a particular point of calling on those priests who were failing to keep up regular contact through the thought-channels.

Like a silver shadow she slipped over the wooden bridge that spanned the deep protective ditch round the huge circle of standing stones. She greeted the night watchman and he stood aside for her, smiling as all people smiled when the Lady Kyra passed by. Khu-ren, her Egyptian husband, was admired; but she was loved. Although she had a married daughter, her step was still as light and firm as a young girl’s, and her hair, standing out around her this early dawn, was still like a fiery cloak of spun gold.

‘Stay in peace,’ she said softly as she passed.

‘Go in peace,’ he replied. It was too early for the dawn ceremonies — but the Lady could go where she pleased.

The grass under her bare feet was cold, a touch of late spring frost sparkling like powdered crystal on the leaves and stalks. She hardly felt it, pleased to be treading directly on the earth.

She did not use the three tall stones at the centre of the inner northern ring, the most sacred and powerful place in the whole system of circles, but went directly to her favourite stone — one she always turned to when she had a personal problem. It was an outer stone of the northern ring, the one against which Khu-ren had stood in that long-gone time when she had first called the Lords of the Sun to her aid, when she had not yet seen him in the flesh but already knew from his spirit-form that she loved him.

She leaned her back against it, looking outwards to the mighty stones of the main circle and the ridge beyond them. She would have seen nothing of the landscape surrounding the Temple even if it had been light, for the ridge would have prevented that, but she could always see the sky. She tipped her head back so that her golden hair flowed over the stone. She watched the subtle and gradual adjustment of colour tones as the earth prepared to receive the Light-giver, the King of Kings. She knew the sun was only the visible cipher for the invisible God, the Nameless One, but the miracle of the rising never ceased to fill her with awe. The sky was lightening to the purple of iris and gentian. One by one the stars were disappearing until, in a pale green dome, one enormous diamond hung, the morning star, the herald of the day, with its entourage of birds.

* * * *

Her husband, Khu-ren, in a distant forest, waking on his bed of moss and dry fern, looked up through the high canopy of branches and saw, blazing through an intricate net of twigs and new leaves, the morning star. He looked into its eye and smiled, knowing that Kyra had found a way to be with him; and then he frowned, for the star was already gone, and a shadow had touched his heart. Was it a warning from Kyra about dangers he would have to face, or was it a call for help against dangers that she had to face? He started to compose himself for spirit-travel, preparing to join her in the Temple — where she must surely be in order to send out such a powerful beam of thought. Before he could leave his body, however, he was distracted by a sound from above and to the left. He turned his head to find that he was being closely watched by the huge and unblinking eyes of an owl.

Khu-ren felt strange — as though he were under some kind of spell, as though someone were deliberately suspending time, deliberately holding him back. He became totally absorbed in his observation of the owl. Every detail of feather and beak, of folded wing, of claw on twig, fascinated him. All the time the light was growing stronger and the creature clearer. Its eyes seemed to stare dispassionately into his innermost thoughts, and by doing so, seemed to blot them out one by one, until his mind was left a blank. He no longer remembered the message of the star, no longer remembered that he had been about to try to make contact with Kyra.

At last the owl moved, and was gone instantly, disappearing into the shadows as though it had never been. Khu-ren ran to the foot of the tree on which it had perched, but there was no sign of it — nor had he heard any sound of beating wings. If it had been an apparition, its ‘sending’ was not from the Temple. He had not missed the malevolence of its penetrating gaze. Hastily he gathered up his possessions, anxious to leave the place.

* * * *

In the great house of the Spear-lord, overlooking the sprawling community of the Temple of the Sun at Haylken, Kyra’s brother Karne half woke to find that his wife Fern was not beside him, and turned over to sleep his dreamless sleep. She often left when first light came. He knew if he looked for her he would find her in her garden. There were three children apart from Isar, and the only time she really had for herself was before they woke in the morning. Sometimes even that was taken away by their youngest, who woke with the birds, but this day, mercifully, he was lying with his thumb in his mouth, breathing steadily, when she crept past him. Karne was the Spear-lord of his village, the first of his people to have that privilege, and the Spear-lord’s lady had not only her own family to attend to, but a constant stream of supplicants and guests.

Fern loved the early morning. It was true the night gave one respite from the noise and bustle of the day, and the difficulties that seemed insoluble at sunset were often sorted out when the mind was still; but the darkness carried its own burdens, and nightmares could creep in below one’s guard. In the morning everything was fresh and new... all good things seemed possible.

She drew her woollen cloak closer over her night shift. It was still very cold, but she knew the sun was returning, and she could stand anything as long as the sun was on its way. Winter was not a good time for her. She hated the long dark when her companions, the plants and the trees, shut themselves down. For months she could have no communication with them. The wind howled through their bare branches with its own voice, not theirs, and she felt alone when she walked over the crackling brown bracken of the forest.

Now everything was stirring again. She could feel the movement inside her rowan tree when she rested her cheek against its bark. Every cell was vibrant with activity — the sap rising through the twigs, pushing out the leaf shoots and the tiny curled blossom buds. Everywhere the earth was cracking open as the green shouldered its way out of the dark towards the returning sun.

Every morning and evening at the same time three geese flew diagonally over her garden, uttering their strange raucous cries. She smiled as she heard them approaching now. Their regularity was comforting though she could never understand why they flew from one apparently identical pool of water to another a few miles away each day and returned to the first each night. Sometimes they dropped feathers for her as they passed. She had a collection of bird feathers in a little wooden box Isar had made for her, the lid beautifully carved with images of birds. She sometimes allowed her daughter Inde to look through them and choose some to play with. The best and largest ones she herself had woven into the slender golden ring she wore around her head sometimes on ceremonial occasions. Her long red-gold hair had a few strands of grey in it now, and she was not as slender as she had been as a young girl, but when her hair was piled on top of her head under the feather crown, and her best green cloak was caught at her shoulder with an amber and gold clasp, she did not look like the mother of four children, one of whom was already grown to manhood.

The geese passed but dropped no feathers this day. Fern went from plant to plant in her garden, tenderly freeing a shoot from the weight of a stone here, placing a stick for a tendril to grasp there. For some reason she began to think about Wardyke. Puzzled, she told herself it must be because she was paying such attention to the new growth coming through. It reminded her of the time her forest began to grow again after Wardyke had cruelly burned it down. She had hated Wardyke and he had raped her, but she no longer carried bitterness for this. Had not this evil brought about her handsome and much-loved son Isar? But she found it difficult to forgive the burning of her forest. She still woke sometimes in the night with tears streaming down her cheeks, unable to tell Karne what was troubling her. It seemed to her she could hear her green children screaming as the flames devoured their branches and tumbled the trunks that had taken so many centuries to grow. It was true a new forest had sprung up again from the charred remains of the old one — buckthorn and dogwood, hazel and alder and ash — but her mighty oaks and the yew trees that seemed to have been growing from before time began were gone, and in this life she would not see them grow to that size again.

‘Why do I remember this now?’ she thought angrily. ‘It’s a long time since I’ve had that dream.’ She shook her head, trying to shake away the memory. The light had been steadily strengthening since she left her bed, and the long rays of the sun were beginning to pick out the frost crystals on certain tall grass leaves so that they momentarily blazed with light and then dissolved. ‘I will not think of Wardyke,’ she told herself. ‘He has no place in our lives now.’ But her tryst with the dawn had been spoiled and for once she was not sorry when she heard the call of her second son, Jan.