The Silver Vortex

Chapter 1-3

Jan was a boy of eleven summers, restless and energetic, usually his father’s companion when he rode or strode about the valley, but not averse to working with his mother in the garden when there was nothing else to do. He came running down the path, ready for the day, impatient that no one else was up and about, chewing on a piece of yesterday’s loaf, a large apple from the last of the winter store in his hand.

Fern straightened up and smiled. Jan was good company — perhaps he would help her dig a trench for the new plantings. She sent him off in search of an antler pick she had put somewhere at the end of the summer and he left with a good grace, glad to have something to do. ‘How tall he is growing,’ she thought, ‘hardly a child any more.’ Inde, her daughter, was a year older, but shorter than he and very different in temperament — passive, steady, reliable but somewhat unimaginative. Jan was quicksilver — never still, never dull, alternately surprising them with his maturity and shocking them with his childishness. If anyone could drive the shadows out of her thoughts it would be Jan. She was glad he was up and about.

* * * *

Unaware of the shadow that was beginning to stalk the quiet community of the Temple of the Sun in the valley of Haylken, Guiron, now a very old man who, after years of wandering, had finally come to live beside the great Nile river in Egypt, went about his daily business. His friend Userhet, also a man long retired from active life, was teaching him to read the writing of his people.

When Guiron first exiled himself from his homeland, Britain, where he had been High Priest of the mighty Temple of the Sun for more years than he cared to count, he made sure that an ocean lay between him and those he loved and whom he felt he had betrayed. But the narrow ocean was not enough. On a clear day he could see a faint smudge of white on the horizon, the white cliffs of his birthland, and he found himself gazing at them, remembering the past with nostalgia, when he should have been seeking the future.

Sadly he gathered his new possessions together and set his face towards the north-east. There he found the climate harsher and the people less friendly. He told himself as he battled against wind and storm and driving sleet, as he was turned away from hearth after hearth, as he heard the wolves singing in the forests and the prey of the bald eagle screaming, that he deserved no more. He journeyed perpetually, seeking some sign, some sage who would teach him something he did not yet know, something that would help him overcome his own nature and free him from the guilt he still felt for what he had done.

In the long dark winter of the far north, where the sun hardly rose for half a year, he thought for a while he had at last found such a sage, such a teacher. The Mogüd, a wise-man, a shaman, holed up against the winter with his apprentice, his grandson, took him and gave him shelter in his rough hut of reed and hide, smoke blackened and stinking of dried fish. He had found Guiron on the verge of death, lost in a thick fog, shivering and frightened, his long years as High Priest forgotten. It was as though he was the first man, crawling on his hands and knees, faced by the primeval void. The Mogüd had lifted him up in his huge arms and carried him until they were on a slope above the fog and Guiron could see a blaze of stars. He wept like a child, knowing that he had forgotten the splendour of existence and had succumbed to unforgivable despair. It was the Mogüd who gradually gave him back himself.

Outside the tight little world of the shaman’s hut the wind howled and the snows piled up. The three of them lived on a sparse diet of dried meat and dried fish. Edible mosses and lichens gathered in the good weather were a welcome supplement. The two old men managed reasonably well, but the growing boy’s eyes grew wild and feverish as he became hungrier and hungrier.

Guiron watched the boy’s training with interest, the very frenzy of his hunger being used by the old man to prod him into states of trance. The shaman’s way was different in many instances from the way of the Temple of the Sun. When he told the Mogüd how differently they worked, the Mogüd said it was because they had a different end in mind. He said that the Lords of the Sun mastered the skills of earthly spirit-travel and could roam the world in search of their peers, but he aimed at leaving the earth altogether and flying to the celestial world of the gods above. Yet even among the shamans of his line there were different methods of working. There was the ‘ladder’ method, where one trained slowly and laboriously to climb step by step to the celestial regions; and there was the method of the eagle, where one flew instantly and directly to one’s goal. He was trying to train the boy to fly — for this was the way with which he was most familiar.

As the winter grew deeper and deeper, and there was no end to the howling of the wind and the darkness that pressed close around them, Guiron and the boy became more and more disorientated, more and more prone to shaking fits and morbid dreams. The Mogüd watched them carefully, eking out the food and water.

One day Guiron woke to find the Mogüd muttering incantations and preparing something in a small wooden bowl. He was taking a pinch of powder from one leather pouch, and a handful of herbs from another. Gradually he mixed together a great many different substances. Guiron watched closely. He could feel that this day was going to be different from the others and he wondered if it would bring him the wisdom and relief he sought. The firelight flickered on the shaman’s face — the contrast of light and deep shadow making an impassive mask of it. Guiron glanced across at the sleeping boy, his tousled hair catching the light but his face still in darkness, unaware that from today there would be no turning back for him.

The Mogüd completed his preparations and called his two students to his side. The old man and the young boy crawled out of their sleeping rugs and stretched, looking hungrily at the rough shelves that housed what food was still left so late in the winter. The shaman shook his head. Today they would not eat. Today he had something much more important for them to do. He produced two ragged cloaks of eagle feathers from a pile of dusty objects behind the food store and bade them put them on. With some distaste, Guiron pulled the half-rotted garment around himself. It scarcely covered his shoulders. But the boy’s face lit up when he saw what his grandfather held in his hands, and he eagerly reached out to take it. His was the longer cloak and he wore it proudly, smoothing out the feathers that were ruffled and out of place, adjusting it until it lay around him like folded wings.

Then the Mogüd took out two pipes and filled their bowls with the mixture he had been making. Solemnly he lit them and handed one to Guiron first and then one to the boy, indicating that they should smoke them. Guiron hesitated a moment, wondering what the shaman was up to, but the boy trustingly put the pipe stem in his mouth at once. Guiron met the Mogüd’s eyes and hesitated no longer. In accepting the Mogüd’s teaching Guiron had agreed to suspend his own judgement... a thing no teacher at the Temple of the Sun would ever have advised — or indeed allowed.

He drew heavily on the pipe and felt the warm smoke filling his lungs.

Satisfied that his students were in the mood to obey him, the Mogüd took out a drum and began to beat it. For a while Guiron squatted on the floor dreamily smoking his pipe, listening with detachment to the music the Mogüd was making. Then, gradually, it began to seem as though the beating of the drum was coming from inside him and he felt the urge to move with it, to express it, to dance...

Guiron and the boy danced round and round, faster and faster. Then it seemed to them that the giant form of the Mogüd stood over them and commanded them to fly, commanded them to overcome the pull of the earth and to fly... to fly above... beyond... to fly like the eagle.

The urge to fly, the belief that he could fly, was all that was left of Guiron’s consciousness. He spread his wings, his feathers ruffled in the dark wind and, straining muscle and sinew, he lifted at last to the air — and flew.

The agony of muscles that had never been used before was almost more than he could bear, but the Mogüd’s voice drove him on, and the passionate desire to fly like the eagle held him to his course. He banked, he turned... his eye as red as a dying sun saw the earth a thousand leagues below him — a blue pearl, luminous in the darkness that surrounded it.

‘Ai,’ his bird-voice called. ‘Ai... ai... ai-i-i...’

The stars, like a handful of diamonds flung into a shaft of sunlight, glittered for a moment and then disappeared. He was among the ‘gods’. He could see their forms: some huge and menacing, others slender and wraithlike, some bedecked in jewels and rich fabrics, some in simple robes of white, some with the shape of men, some alien and weird... All with masks.

Guiron was filled with terror. ‘If only I could see their faces,’ he thought. ‘If only I knew who they were. If only I could look into their eyes.’

His human frame could take no more. His wings failed him and he spiralled down and down through darkness and cold to fall with a sickening thud at the feet of the Mogüd.

After a long time he opened his eyes.

He was in the smoky hut of the shaman. Beside him lay the body of the boy, with the wizened form of his instructor crouched over him, rocking on his heels, keening.

The boy was dead.

Shaking and confused, Guiron rose and stood beside them, gazing down at the body of the boy, the shell, the pathetic little pile of flesh and bone still in the cloak of dead and lustreless feathers.

Guiron felt sick and sad. He turned away and crept into his sleeping rugs in the corner. He lay down with his face to the wall and pulled them over his head. He was weary, weary. He was no longer sure what was right and what was wrong. He had had great faith in the Mogüd — but now he wondered. He felt dissatisfied, as though he had been cheated in some way, as though his flight had been an illusion induced by smoking the pipe and not as he had always understood such flights should be — a reaching of the actual soul, the eternal Self, towards the higher realms. He had always believed that these higher realms were not literally above the stars, but out of Time and out of Space altogether — a question of quality rather than of position. No wonder the ‘gods’ he had seen had been masked — they were no more than figments of his own imagination performing the role he demanded of them, like actors in a play. He had not really wanted to see behind their masks, because, if he had, he would have known them for what they were. How he longed for some One he did not know, some One he could not know... the Nameless One beyond all self-deception and illusion.

The Mogüd had suggested that the Lords of the Sun were earth-bound, and Guiron admitted it was this earth-realm that concerned them most — but only because without an understanding of what they were here and now they could not adequately prepare for what they were to become. When they reached for the celestial realms they wanted to be sure they could distinguish what was real and what was not.

In the spring Guiron left the Mogüd, seeking the sun and a teaching that he could better trust. It was thus that he had come, at last, to Egypt.

Guiron’s admiration for Userhet knew no bounds. He was an adept of the highest order and a master of his country’s enormous and complex store of knowledge. Coming from a culture that wrote nothing down, but learned everything by direct transmission from teacher to pupil, Guiron was fascinated by this, to him, new way of learning. He begged Userhet to teach him how to decipher and to inscribe, hoping perhaps to find among these elaborate glyphs something that would lift him far beyond himself. Userhet, in turn, was interested to learn what he could from the traveller — for what had been certainty when he was young now seemed, in old age, not so simple, not so certain.

While Wardyke and Urak hatched their plans for vengeance against him in Britain, Guiron lived a pleasant life in Egypt, full of hope that he had finally put to rest the old and troublesome web in which he had once been caught.