The Endless Knot (54 page)

“Sorry, it's just that I—”

“I've never been so embarrassed in all my life. Really, Lewis, you—”

“Susannah!”

That stopped her. I took her by the shoulders and turned her to face me squarely. “Listen, Susannah. I have to talk to you. Now. It's important.” Having begun, the words came rolling out of my mouth in a giddy rush. “I didn't understand before. But I do now. It's incredible! I know what happened. I know what it's all about. It's—”

“What
what
is all about?” she asked, clutching my arm and eyeing me carefully.

“I was a king in Albion!” I shouted. “Do you know what that means, Susannah? Do you have any idea?”

A few nearby heads swiveled in our direction. Susannah regarded me with faint alarm, biting her lower lip.

“Look,” I said, trying a different approach, “would you mind if we didn't go out? We could go back to Nettles's place and talk. I have to tell somebody. Would you mind?”

Overcome with relief, she smiled and looped her arm through mine. “I'd love to. I'll fix lunch for us there, and you can tell me everything.”

We talked all the way home, and all during lunch. I put food in my mouth, but I did not taste a single bite. I burned with the certainty of the truth I had glimpsed. I had swallowed the sun and now it was leaking out through every pore and follicle. I talked like a crazy man, filling hour after hour with words and words and more words, yet never coming near to describing the merest fragment of what I had experienced.

Susannah listened to it all, and after lunch even suggested that we walk by the river so that she could stay awake and hear some more. We walked until the sun began to sink into a crisp, spring twilight. The sky glowed a bright burnished blue, red-gold clouds drifted over emerald hills and fields of glowing green. Couples and families ambled peacefully along the path, and swans plied the river like feathered galleons. Everywhere I looked, I saw tranquility made visible—a true Sabbath rest.

“You were right,” she said when I at last ran out of breath. “It is incredible.” There was more, much more to say, but my jaw ached and my throat was dry. “Simply incredible.” She snuggled close and put her head on my shoulder as we turned our steps toward home.

“Yes, it is. But you're the only one who will ever know.”

She stopped and turned to me. “But you've got to tell people, Lewis. It's important.” I opened my mouth to object and she saw it coming. “I mean it, Lewis,” she insisted. “You can't keep something like this to yourself. You must let people know—it's your duty.”

Just thinking of the newspapers made me cringe. Reporters thrusting microphones and clicking cameras in my face, television, radio— an endless progression of skeptics, cranks, and hectoring unbelievers, . . . Never.

“Who would believe me?” I asked hopelessly. “If I told this to anyone else, it would be a one-way ticket to the loony bin for yours truly.”

“Maybe,” she allowed, “but you wouldn't actually have to tell them.”

“No?”

“You could write it down. You know your way around a keyboard,” Susannah pointed out, warming to her own idea. “You could live in Nettles's flat, and I could help: We could do it together.” Her eyebrows arched in challenge and her lips curled with mischief. “C'mon, what do you say?”

Which is how I came to be sitting at Nettles's desk in front of a testy old typewriter with a ream of fresh white paper, with Susannah clattering around in the kitchen making tea and sandwiches. I slipped a sheet of paper under the bail and stretched my fingers over the keys.

Nothing came. Where does one begin to tell such a tale?

Glancing across the desktop, my eye caught a corner of a scrap of paper with a bit of colored ink on it. I picked up the scrap. It was a Celtic knotwork pattern—the one Professor Nettleton had shown me. I stared at the dizzy, eye-bending design: two lines interwoven, all elements balanced, spinning forever in perfect harmony. The Endless Knot.

Instantly, the words began to flow and I began to type:

It all began with the aurochs . . .

I
NTERVIEW WITH
A
UTHOR

Publisher Allen Arnold read the Song of Albion books when they were first published fifteen years ago. He has re-read them a few times since, and recently was able to ask Stephen Lawhead some questions about this exceptional trilogy and the world of Albion.

Arnold: What is an ‘endless knot'?

Lawhead:
I use this term to describe the interconnected nature of the spiritual and material world–or, within the context of these books, the manifest world and Otherworld— as expressed in Celtic knot-work patterns. There is a classic knotwork patterns on the cover of these editions, and a smaller
triquetra (
three-fold knot) within the body of the text.

At first glance, these may appear to be simply pleasing swirls or interlaced lines. A closer examination will reveal that all the lines are continuous, that they follow a strict over-and-under path, and that eventually they return to themselves–an endless knot.

There is much conjecture by historians and artists about the meaning of the various traditional patterns. At the very least though, we see in these a harmony, symmetry, and whimsy that sits beautifully with strong lines and rigorous organisation of the design.

But if one of the lines were to get out of the pattern, if the knot were to unravel in some way . . .

A: Some characters don't make it through to the end of the trilogy,
and it comes as a shock to the reader.

L
: Sometimes it's a shock to the writer, too. Believe it or not, I never want them to die—but sometimes it does happen. I certainly don't kill them off in order to heighten interest or because I'm bored with them. They died, or they get killed, because of natural consequences—within the sub-created world—or because death is inescapably a part of life, in fiction as well as the real world. At that point, my job is simply to report what happened.

A: Simon is a classic villain in the sense that readers absolutely hate
him. Did he evolve as a character, and how do you feel about Simon?

L:
In Simon we see where cynicism, egotism, and rebellion lead, once the humour is gone. When we first meet him in
The Paradise War
, he is an amusing guy whose jaundiced view of the world is quite entertaining. We all know people like that. But at some point, the stakes get higher, and the question is: how will this person respond? They're good at identifying and satirising what is bad in the world, but do they have a positive vision of how the world should be—and are they willing to make it happen?

By the time Simon has used Albion to feed his own ego, and especially at the point that he begins imposing his own twisted worldview on Otherworld, he is well and truly the villain of the piece. His wilful refusal to return to the manifest world—thereby disobeying the Rule One, which is that it is forbidden for a mortal to remain in the Otherworld—sows the seeds of his own downfall.

How do I feel about Simon? Many actors say that they enjoy playing the bad guy, and on one level I enjoy writing into these characters. Simon is someone I know, because his type is endemic in our world. I despise and pity him.

A: Okay, I have to ask this, and not just because I'm the publisher!
On behalf of the countless fans who are begging for a fourth
SONG OF ALBION novel . . . is a re-visiting or return of some
kind a possibility?

L:
Absolutely not. I accept the compliment that many readers have paid in wanting the further adventures of Llew Silver Hand . . . but it would completely destroy the arc of the story and diminish what exists, spoiling the “divine” architecture of three books of thirty-nine chapters, as well as violating the central premise that it is forbidden to return to Albion!

As with the endless knot of Celtic art, this series—in which the last words of the last book are identical to the first words of the first book—is finished when it has returned to itself. The reader has, at that point, come full circle in the mythic cycle, and is now ready to face the circle of his or her own life as it begins anew—but this time with greater knowledge and awareness of what the journey is, and what is needed to travel successfully.

E
XCERPT FROM
H
OOD

T
he pig was young and wary, a yearling boar timidly testing the wind for strange scents as it ventured out into the honey-coloured light of a fast-fading day. Bran ap Brychan, Prince of Elfael, had spent the entire day stalking the greenwood for a suitable prize, and he meant to have this one.

Eight years old and the king's sole heir, he knew well enough that he would never be allowed to go out into the forest alone. So rather than seek permission, he had simply taken his bow and four arrows early that morning and stolen from the caer unnoticed. This hunt, like the young boar, was dedicated to his mother, the queen. She loved the hunt and gloried in the wild beauty and visceral excitement of the chase. Even when she did not ride herself, she would ready a welcome for the hunters with a saddle cup and music, leading the women in song. “Don't be afraid,” she told Bran when, as a toddling boy, he had been dazzled and a little frightened by the noise and revelry.

“We belong to the land. Look, Bran!” She lifted a slender hand toward the hills and the forest rising like a living rampart beyond. “All that you see is the work of our Lord's hand. We rejoice in his provision.”

Stricken with a wasting fever, Queen Rhian had been sick most of the summer, and in his childish imaginings, Bran had determined that if he could present her with a stag or a boar that he had brought down all by himself, she would laugh and sing as she always did, and she would feel better. She would be well again.

All it would take was a little more patience and . . . Still as stone, he waited in the deepening shadow. The young boar stepped nearer, its small pointed ears erect and proud. It took another step and stopped to sample the tender shoots of a mallow plant. Bran, an arrow already nocked to the string, pressed the bow forward, feeling the tension in his shoulder and back just the way Iwan said he should. “Do not aim the arrow,” the older youth had instructed him. “Just
think
it to the mark. Send it on your thought, and if your thought is true, so, too, will fly the arrow.”

Pressing the bow to the limit of his strength, he took a steadying breath and released the string, feeling the sharp tingle on his fingertips. The arrow blazed across the distance, striking the young pig low in the chest behind the front legs. Startled, it flicked its tail rigid, and turned to bolt into the wood . . . but two steps later its legs tangled; it stumbled and went down. The stricken creature squealed once and tried to rise, then subsided, dead where it fell.

Bran loosed a wild whoop of triumph. The prize was his! He ran to the pig and put his hand on the animal's sleek, slightly speckled haunch, feeling the warmth there.

“I am sorry, my friend, and I thank you,” he murmured as Iwan had taught him. “I need your life to live.”

It was only when he tried to shoulder his kill that Bran realized his great mistake. The dead weight of the animal was more than he could lift by himself. With a sinking heart, he stood gazing at his glorious prize as tears came to his eyes. It was all for nothing if he could not carry the trophy home in triumph.

Sinking down on the ground beside the warm carcass, Bran put his head in his hands. He could not carry it, and he would not leave it.

What was he going to do?

As he sat contemplating his predicament, the sounds of the forest grew loud in his ears: the chatter of a squirrel in a treetop, the busy click and hum of insects, the rustle of leaves, the hushed flutter of wings above him, and then . . .

“Bran!”

Bran started at the voice. He glanced around hopefully.