The Silver Vortex

Chapter 2-1

Chapter 2

Isar and DevaUrak dismissed Boggoron and prepared to make the search for Deva, daughter of Kyra. There was a flat, smooth slab of black stone just outside the entrance to her cave, very different from the grey limestone on the rest of the mountain, and this she swept carefully — using a small brush of eagle feathers tied with a wolf-skin thong. Then she polished the stone with a soft cloth of doeskin. When she was satisfied that it was spotless she arranged a circle of red jasper pebbles on it, smooth and river-worn. In the centre of this she marked a pentacle, using a piece of white chalkstone.

There was one more thing to do. From a thong around her neck she untied a flattened disc of flint with a hole in the middle. She laid it in the pentacle so that it formed a small circular holding plinth. Then she went to a niche in the darkest part of her cave and drew out a snakeskin pouch. From this she removed a sphere of dark, almost black, smoky quartz. She had shaped and polished it from a huge single crystal until it was a smooth black ball, a scrying stone with a mirror surface.

The sun was rising fast, shining through the branches of the tall trees that grew in the valley well below the witch-woman’s cave, their crowns on a level with her floor.

She arranged the black sphere with great care, edging it from side to side until she was satisfied that it was perfectly centred. Then she waited, squatting cross-legged beside it with her back to the cave, facing the forest and the sun. She was ready the instant the sun rose above the tree tops and blazed down on to her table of symbols and artefacts. As the sunlight reached the black sphere, it illuminated not only the surface but the depths as well. As Urak leant closer and peered into it, she seemed to catch a glimpse of a huge circular temple of standing stones surrounded by a deep ditch and a high ridge; by burial mounds; by encampments and settled villages. She knew at once that this was the Temple of the Sun at Haylken, the centre from which all the thousands of stone circles throughout the land drew their strength and to which all who wanted to be of the priesthood gravitated for training.

The vision was gone almost as soon as it came. The sun had climbed higher and the angle of its rays no longer focused the light in that particular way. But Urak had seen enough. She knew the place. She had been there as a child, taken by her parents to be offered for training — partly because her family were convinced that she was a natural candidate for the priesthood with her strong psychic abilities, and partly because she was such a headstrong and difficult child they did not know what else to do with her. They hoped the famous Temple discipline would tame her and give them and the rest of the family and their neighbours some respite from her increasingly sadistic tricks. But she had refused to stay. There was something about the Temple that made her uncomfortable.

She had passed all the tests the priests put her through and everything seemed settled, when suddenly she started to weep and stamp her feet, and demand that she be taken home. She could see the eyes of the High Priest now as though it were yesterday — looking into her own with that disconcerting, steady, penetrating gaze. He knew then why she could not stay and quietly told her disappointed and protesting parents to take her home. Before they left he drew her aside and made various secret signs and passes over her head. When she demanded to know what he was doing in her small piping child’s voice, he looked at her very gravely and murmured, more to himself than to her: ‘I have done what I can... but I fear you will one day prove to be too strong for us.’

At the time she had not taken much notice of the enigmatic words and, indeed, was so delighted to have won her battle to be going home that she had apparently forgotten them until this moment. Now, as they came back to her from some deep storage region in her mind, she took them as a sign that she would be successful in taking whatever or whomever she wanted from the Temple.

‘So, Deva, daughter of Kyra, you are at the Temple of the Sun. But your destiny does not lie there and there you will not stay.’

Urak replaced the precious black sphere in its pouch and returned it to the depths of her cave. The red jasper pebbles were placed in their own pouch of wolfskin beside it. The pentacle she rubbed out with spit and her index finger. The flint with the hole she returned to the thong around her neck.

She had located her heir. Now all that remained was for her to claim her and train her.

The sun was much higher now, shining down into the valley that lay at her feet. The sides of the gorge were steep, birch and hazel and mountain ash clinging to the silvery grey walls of rock, ferns and moss flowing from crevices where soil had gathered and retained some moisture on the surface. Most of the rainwater in these mountains disappeared down sinkholes and drained away in an elaborate series of underground rivers and waterfalls. Urak knew that her mountains were hollow. What looked like gigantic slabs and mounds of solid rock were mostly thin shells of limestone over vast underground passages and halls. Guiron, in banishing her to these mountains, was unwittingly giving her access to a labyrinth which served her both as a luxurious dwelling and a hideaway where no one would ever be able to find her.

* * * *

Isar was preparing for a journey. Kyra had expressed a wish for a very special wooden bowl in which to keep her precious collection of double-ended crystals, and Khu-ren had asked Isar, the Temple wood-carver, to make it for her as a surprise. Isar had looked through the seasoned wood he had in store and found that none of it was suitable. He remembered a huge old oak he had once seen in a forest some distance away, so old that half of it had been brought down in a storm, while the rest remained standing black and gnarled with age, but still putting out fresh green shoots in the spring. He was by no means sure that it would still be there for him, but it was so far off the beaten path he had hope that it would not have been spotted by any of the woodsmen. On the fallen part there was a huge oak burr that would do very well for Kyra’s bowl.

He set off along the ridgeway that led towards the north, soon striding past a place the locals called the ‘field of the grey gods’ — that strange and haunted field where his palace had once stood in a past life, long-gone, ancient days. He remembered a time in this present life when, as a child, he had been taken there by Wardyke and glimpsed for a moment something of the splendours of that distant past life of his. He remembered also how Kyra had come seeking him and angrily pulled him back to the present.

But the field was soon past and he forgot the shadows it contained as a skylark trilled above his head. The huge circular Temple of the Sun was no longer visible, nor the plumes of smoke from the long wooden buildings that surrounded it. Even the mysterious flat-topped hill beyond the Temple that some people thought was a haunted burial mound, but which he believed to be a holy mountain raised in the ancient days to be close to the moon, the sun and the stars — even that had finally disappeared from sight. Everywhere the soft flush of hawthorn blossom drifted like white mist over the green, while underfoot all manner of small flowers peered out — the tiny crocus and the violet, the tall speckled snake-head fritillary so sacred to the Temple, the primrose, the lover’s periwinkle. What had been bare fields a few weeks before were now emerald green as the barley and the wheat began to grow. The high ridge took him into the forests at last, but he still had a long way to go. Oak did not grow comfortably on the chalk and was not commonly found among these gentle white hills.

About midday he rested in the sunshine with his back against a tree. He was tired and soon dozed off. The sun had moved a long way and he was in the shade when he woke, startled, at the sound of someone approaching.

‘Deva!’ he called out in surprise. Kyra’s beautiful daughter was indeed standing in front of him, out of breath but smiling broadly. She was dressed in travelling clothes, close-fitting buckskin trousers under her thigh-length tunic, boots laced up to her knees and a short cape flung jauntily over her shoulder. Her long black hair was plaited and tied back so that her face was completely clear of it. Her jet-black eyes were sparkling.

‘Yes, Deva,’ she said cheerfully. ‘Not an apparition or a dream or a ghoul. Deva in flesh and blood!’ And she laughed as she held out her hands to him.

Delighted, he took them in his own and allowed himself to be pulled to his feet by her.

‘What are you doing here?’

She stood on her toes and kissed him lightly on his lips: a butterfly wing could not have administered a lighter touch. He squeezed her hands warmly and kissed her where her hair joined her forehead. For the moment, in the joy of seeing her so unexpectedly, he had forgotten that recently, on more than one occasion, he had intercepted a look from her that made him uneasy.

‘I’m going to Farla’s wedding at Hael,’ she said, naming a village not far from the very place where he hoped to find the oak burr. ‘I heard you were probably on this road and I hoped I’d catch up with you. I’ve been running most of the way!’

He grinned. ‘It would be good to have your company,’ he said lightly. ‘But we’d better get on if we want to reach Hael before nightfall.’

But Deva was hungry and thirsty and they stayed a while longer for her to eat some of Lark’s freshly baked bread and drink from his water-skin. She had left in such haste she had not brought any provisions for herself.

Isar cast an anxious look at the sky. It was later than he wished and a billowing mass of clouds was piling up on the horizon.

‘If we don’t start soon we’ll be caught in that storm,’ he said. But she insisted that she was still tired and needed more rest.

‘Those clouds will take a long time to reach us,’ she protested.

But a wind had sprung up and they were moving with alarming speed across the sky.

‘Come,’ he insisted, and held out his hand to help her to her feet. It had been pleasant for a time to sit at the roadside talking of this and that, but he was beginning to feel impatient to be on the way again.

As he pulled her up, she stumbled slightly and fell against him. There it was again — the look in her eyes that should not have been in any woman’s eyes for a man not her husband. He moved away quickly and started to stride forward. She followed, two steps to his one, complaining that he was walking too fast. He did not slacken his pace.

It was not long before the clouds completely covered the sun, and they were nowhere near Hael when the rainstorm broke.

The distant landscape disappeared under a heavy veil of grey and the wind roared and rattled in the forests, rubbing and beating the branches of the trees together. Isar looked back at Deva and saw that she was almost being knocked off her feet by the fierceness of the gusts. He raced back to her and took her arm. Everything loose seemed to be whirling around them and everything rooted was being tugged and shaken. Then the first drops of rain fell, heavy and fast.

‘We’d better take shelter,’ Isar shouted against the wind and she nodded. The road here was wide and exposed, a ridge above the forest to the left and the open country to the right. They were already almost soaked through. He looked desperately around, but there was nowhere to go except down into the forested valley and hope that they could get below the wind and under trees clustered thickly enough to keep off most of the rain.

They slipped and slithered over the deep matting of wet dead leaves and down a steep slope, hand in hand. The spring growth was not as thick as they would have liked and most of the trees afforded very little shelter. The noise of the gale in the branches and the increasing orchestra of sounds in the valley as the stream swelled, rushing and gurgling over the rocks, put them into something of a panic. What if a tree blew down? They had both seen trees uprooted by gales, huge branches snapped like thin twigs.