The World Above the Sky (33 page)

“I am,” Mimk
ɨ
tawo'qu'sk answered.

And a little child shall lead them, Henry thought. But where? Eugainia slipped a comforting hand in Henry's. Keswalqw took his free right hand in hers.

Mimk
ɨ
tawo'qu'sk said a word he knew. Tutji'j Jipijka'maq lost rigidity, curved and twisted back upon herself, coiled and uncoiled. Tutji'j Jipijka'maq's jaws unhinged, prepared to receive the arm of Mimk
ɨ
tawo'qu'sk, Bear Master and Serpent King. Mimk
ɨ
tawo'qu'sk slipped his hand beyond her backward-sloping fangs, deep into the expanding throat of the snake, inserting his arm by slow degrees as one would fit a soft leather gauntlet. When
Tutji'j Jipijka'maq's
head reached his shoulder, her serpent flesh dissolved. Only the outline of her serpent skin, scales in slight relief, remained. The blue and red serpent tattoo Eugainia traced with her finger on his skin the night on Apekwit when she and Mimk
ɨ
tawo'qu'sk first made love, this same tattoo came to life before her eyes and rippled beneath the surface of the young Man-God's skin. Tutji'j Jipijka'maq's serpent eyes, alive in Mimk
ɨ
tawo'qu'sk's left shoulder, were drawn to a flash of light. Eugainia returned the star-stone to her lover. Back in Mimk
ɨ
tawo'qu'sk's possession, the spearhead—cutting tooth of Wolverine, the piercing tooth of Destiny—pulsed a brighter blue.

The Seven Sleepers, alert and watchful, their deep chests rumbling—dropped to the ground and stamped their great front feet. Mimk
ɨ
tawo'qu'sk raised his hand and pointed the star-stone toward the apex of the dome. The young Shaman God, the warrior husband of Woman Who Fell in Love with the Moon, father of their immortal child, felt the cavern floor slip away as he ascended. He reached down and clasped Eugainia's wrist. Henry held tight to Eugainia's free hand. With the other he clung like a child to Keswalqw.

Four spirit shapes—the souls of Henry, Eugainia, Keswalqw and Mimk
ɨ
tawo'qu'sk— rose from their bodies, hovered near the apex of the dome, waiting. Henry looked down at his living, empty shell. His shoulders were high and tight. His face had flushed a deeper red than usual before he left his body, ashamed perhaps, to feel like a small boy holding tight his mother and older sister's hands for the comfort he might find.

The bears unleashed a final roar. The floor opened.

Mimk
ɨ
tawo'qu'sk tightened his grip on the star-stone. The eyes of the serpent-child floating free in the air glanced down to the depths of the chasm. Mimk
ɨ
tawo'qu'sk aligned the star-stone and plunged from sight. Eugainia and Keswalqw—Henry secured between them—the twisting tail of a kite caught in a radiant spiral twisted down through the outer crust of the earth.

Henry glanced behind. His fear echoed in a flash of shared consciousness.

“It's all right, Henry. We've no need of muscle, blood and bone here.”

“Just these...?”

“These golden cords. Tethers of light tying soul to body.”

“And if they snap?”

“They rarely do. Hang on, dear Henry. The best is yet to come!”

Mimk
ɨ
tawo'qu'sk directed the spearhead star-stone toward the geometric centre of the earth. The travellers hurtled down, and further down, drawn by the force of a magnet pulled to the source from which it had arisen, from which it drew all its strength, to which it was compelled to return. They broke the barrier between the earth's crust and mantle. Henry became aware of indescribable heat. The matter through which they dove became less solid than rock, though its density was not decreased. Fluid. Rock. At once one and the other. In the way of ice, the magma captured light and held it. Yet light streaked through.

Eugainia looked about in wonder. She imagined the workings of a fevered brain. Flashing webs ferried bolts of light from one churning plane down to the next. Scarlet whorls, fiery plumes, sheets of colour rose, flickered, swirled, blended, fragmented; great spars and pinnacles branched and then dissolved in all directions, before, behind, above and below the questing spirits; lucent spirals arcing up to the lower surface of the reflective crust cast wave upon cascading wave to cycle back down to the earth's core, from which the radiant fires had arisen.

Eugainia recalled her conversation twelve months ago with her earth mother, the spirit woman Garathia, as they sped together in the body of a seal through curtains of fish to the depths of the cold northern sea. “One day,” Garathia had told her daughter, “I shall penetrate the core of the earth itself.”

In the distance, below, a star. Around it, a luminous sphere. Around both, a radiant globe. The core of the earth and its outer shell awaited. Through the snap and crack of the vast rhythmic swirl—rock not rock, liquid not liquid, heat not born of flame—the travellers plummeted, arrow-straight shafts of light splitting the viscous mantle, storming down to their destiny in the iron-hard heart of the world.

• • •

Fiery curtains and radiant spires collapsed in waves of magnetic heat. Expanding vortices stalled, contracted, spiralled down to surround the perfect sphere at the centre of the earth. Polished by heat and time, in shape and size a match for the moon, it revealed its progenitor—the sun—in its star-stone brilliance. Yet after uncountable millenia, the earth's core remained more luminous than Grandmother Moon, and as radiant as Grandfather Sun.

The travellers paused in their descent. Henry felt the workings of this inner world, an electric, fiery template for the minds of all men and beasts. He knew the spirit-traveller's ecstasy. Henry's thoughts travelled the radiant mantle like the sound of words travel through air. There is no dichotomy. We're wrong to think of the centre of the earth as hell. All creation is a set of variations on a single theme.

Eugainia agreed. A great engine of life, not a place of retribution…a fiery seed planted in the womb of mother earth.

Why did they bring us here, Eugainia?

A familiar female voice, not Eugainia's or Keswalqw's, seemed to emanate from all directions at once. To strengthen you both, cousin and daughter. For the trials that await you.

Visions of the bodies, men living and dead, piled high against familiar oaken doors assaulted Henry.

Who spoke? he asked.

Not I. Eugainia scanned the curtain of light swirling past. I think it was Garathia.

Your Mother.

Daughter…cousin I said we'd meet again.

The voice trailed off and was gone.

Henry's anguish flashed like fire. Amid images of blood and slaughter at the doors of Rosslyn Castle, Henry could summon no vision of the fate of his wife Igidia. Or his daughters.

Wait! What trials await me?

The star-stone rose from Mimk
ɨ
tawo'qu'sk's hand. It moved swiftly, of its own accord, etched the face of a woman in the fiery depths of the cloud. As Garathia appeared, her thoughts sped through a tunnel of light toward Henry.

You stand amazed, Henry Sinclair. You don't remember me?

Yes, Garathia. I do. Daughter of the Royal and Holy Blood. Kinswoman by way of the French St. Clairs. Earthly mother to Eugainia. And so my cousin.

Just so.

Please. What of Igidia? My daughters?

Eugainia rose from her place beside Henry. She hovered at Mimk
ɨ
tawo'qu'sk's side. Mimk
ɨ
tawo'qu'sk made a gesture he knew. The star-stone etched a second face upon the first. Garathia's features dissolved. The shift was barely perceptible. A perfect likeness of Keswalqw was overlaid.

They make a handsome pair, do they not, Sister?

Garathia's features, line, plane and shadow, overlaid Keswalqw's.

They do indeed.

The fiery cloud shape-shifted. Two faces became one.

Henry rose in wonder. You are one person? One entity?

Two voices mingled in response. Keswalqw and Garathia revolved though a tight cycle of transformation, the features dissolving one into the other, individual and distinct, two manifestations of the single being.

We were. We are. We will be. We're one. And we are the other.

You know the future as well as the past?

We do.

Then tell me if you can. What shall become of me?

Choose to stay among The People, Henry…Garathia's image faltered with her fading voice. You'll live a long and happy life...

Return to Scotland and die...Keswalqw's image wavered... protecting what you love the most.

My wife and daughters. What will become of them if I stay?

The women's voices fused. Go or stay, it makes no difference. Your daughters will marry well and flourish. Igidia will live a long and peaceful life in a place we will make for her.

The fire faces vanished. The cloud disappeared.

Wait. Wait! Will I see them again? Before—

The star-stone shot toward the silver core. The haze of light Mimk
ɨ
tawo'qu'sk became traced a rising arc and then plunged from sight to the heart of the maelstrom. Henry and Eugainia marvelled at the magnificent turbulence below. Flashes of lightning, white with heat, struck the core and emanated from it. Molten metal thundered against its polished surface. Nacreous gyres eddied up and away. Whip-snap flares of radiant energy lashed outward, curled and, like their counterparts on the surface of the sun, fell back to the surface where they dissipated.

Mimk
ɨ
tawo'qu'sk, an impatient shadow, reclined on the skin of the core. He tossed the star-stone from hand to fiery hand. When they arrived, Henry and Eugainia felt Mimk
ɨ
tawo'qu'sk's presence but not those of either Keswalqw or Garathia.

They wait inside, Mimk
ɨ
tawo'qu'sk informed them, then hurled the star-stone toward the core's far horizon. The instant it fell from view it reappeared on the near horizon, shot past the spirit travellers and disappeared again. On its second pass, Henry, Eugainia and Mimk
ɨ
tawo'qu'sk, each now a packet of pure energy compelled by a greater binding force, followed. The star-stone's velocity decreased as its orbit declined. Its three tails of light slowed with it. The star-stone struck the skin of the core where it skipped like a stone on the sea. It came to rest, pulsed twice and sank from sight. The three spirit travellers, slaves to the spearhead/star-stone's slightest impulse followed, wafting like thistledown through the star-hard iron-and-nickel core.

Keswalqw and Garathia waited at the centre of the core, the very centre of the earth, each robed in silver radiance. Invisible vectors aligned all five travellers along parallel axes controlled by the unseen force. Each felt a surge of energy speed trough them, a wavering flow of
Kji-knap
that arced up and out. The star-stone serpent head floated above and behind Garathia and Keswalqw. Of its own accord, it edged with a snap into the notch at the centre of all geometry from which it had been carved and given to humankind in the time before memory or meaning.

Garathia and Keswalqw sped away, the others followed. Five points of light, the spirit fire of the five travellers, spun with increasing velocity through individual trajectories, electrons circling the star-stone nucleus. Each left a trail of fire, replicating in miniature the circumference of the core.

At each orbit the star-stone, around which the spirit-questing travellers flew, pulsed with increased intensity. Power accumulated, shared Power. Henry felt
Kji-knap
from the World Below the Earth fuel Mimk
ɨ
tawo'qu'sk and Keswalqw, the two Great Shamans of The People, and the White Goddess Eugainia with Her Mother, The Lady Garathia. In the World Below the Earth, the celestial Ghost World quartet gathered the Power required to work their miracles in the Sea World, the Earth World, the Sky World and the World Above the Sky.

The star-stone commenced a slow revolve, countering that of the core. The magnetic fire fell still. Radiant pillars in the mantle above them collapsed. Molten curtains of liquid rock congealed. Not since the morning of the day of the great cataclysm, in the time before time found its meaning, had the universe known such peace. The earth hung without motion in an infinite field of star-studded black.

The spirit travellers spun to a starry blur. The star-stone shot upward, broke through the core's skin. In their race to follow, the travellers abandoned their ordered elliptical flights, traced collapsing orbits until they collided. Five white-hot Star Persons—Prince Henry Sinclair and Eugainia St. Clair Delacroix among them—fused in the centre of the earth.

Great
Kji-knap
was born.

Athol Gunn, piping his way down the path to the village, felt the Earth World tremble. Lightning shot from an open seam on the side of the Smoking Mountain. The bright bolt forked. Five fiery arrows, led by a brighter sixth, shot high into the northwest quadrant of the mid-day sky.

One of the fiery arrows circled the moon. The traces of light it described dissolved in a boreal bloom. Keswalqw, Goddess of the Earth, parted the wavering curtain. She walked the lunar surface. She danced a circle dance she knew, nudging Grandmother Moon from her solitary walk toward the face of Grandfather Sun.

Another bolt, glowing white with Sky World heat, pierced earth's atmosphere, dove down and struck the surface of the sea. A plume of water and steam shot high into the air above
Reclamation
when Garathia with her great earth-core heat plunged below the surface. Antonio Zeno found shelter in the fore-castle from a fathom of fish which fell from the sky and smashed to the deck. Blood and sperm, guts and roe washed overboard when tonnes of sea water fell in a black squall of rain.

Below
Reclamation
, a pair of white-beaked dolphins circled Garathia. One rolled to her back, inviting the Goddess of the Ocean Seas to enter. When settled inside the warm sea mammal's body, Garathia found her dolphin voice. She called to the whale fish of the northern seas in her high, thin song. The great oceangoing mammals answered. Garathia, in her dolphin form, broke the surface, her hind flukes sculling lightly to keep her vertical. She called to her sister in the World Above the Sky. On the surface of the moon, Keswalqw slowed her dance.

The weakest bolt of light fell from the Sky to the Earth World. It struck the ground behind Athol Gunn. He recoiled at the hiss, snap and bone-rattling crack. He found himself airborne. He looked back to where he'd stood a split second before his muscles' instinctive twitch. Henry, unsteady, stared at the ground below his feet. He regarded his cousin sprawled in bracken bordering the path.

“Where've you been, laddie,” Athol asked, extracting himself from the vegetation. “You look completely flummoxed!”

“Where no living human being, with the possible exception of Orpheus seeking Euridice, has ever gone before.”

“You disappeared into that rock not five minutes past, the time it took me to walk down this path.”

“Then we've no time to waste. We must weigh anchor before it gets dark.”

“It's high noon, laddie, on a sunny day!”

“Not for long.”

“Eh?”

“Hadn't you noticed the stars?”

Athol looked up to the sky.

“Stars. In a brilliant blue sky. Bright as night in the middle of the day? What next?”

Henry nodded toward a young pine beside the path. On a low branch, a mated pair of goldfinches, black-capped heads tucked underwing, slept.

“Birds fast asleep and it not noon! Keswalqw! Where's Keswalqw?”

“Look. Up.”

In the World Above the Sky, Grandmother Moon, with deep apology to Grandfather Sun, smudged a crescent wedge of shadow on his shining face.

Night fell swiftly upon the face of the earth. Keswalqw looked across the sky from the moon to the indigo globe, dark and still, starlight ghosting its swaths of blanketing cloud. Satisfied, she looked above and behind her, up into infinite black. The star-stone, closely pursued by two lesser stars, sped across the zenith toward the constellation of the Great Bear.

Antonio Zeno paced the slippery deck of
Reclamation
. First there was light. Too much light. Now no light at all. No eclipse had been predicted. According to
Reclamation
's garrulous astrologer (the man was given to great declarations pronounced in a loud, academic voice), a total eclipse was not possible when the moon was full—an eclipse being, by definition, a new moon phenomenon. Nor did a solar eclipse, total and unmoving, occur within seconds. As had this. And, the astrologer reminded him in a voice uncharacteristically low, fish did not normally fall from the sky in clouds of steam.

Antonio brushed him aside. A greater discord troubled him. No stars rose in the east or fell from view in the west. “God in heaven help us,” he said aloud, suspecting the magnitude of the forces aligning against him. “Is it possible the earth has stopped turning?” His eye was directed by the astounded astrologer to sudden motion among the fixed, unmoving stars.

In the World Above the Sky, the constellation known to The People as the Canoe of the Two Hunters broke free from its eternal mooring. In the opposite quadrant, the constellation Bear-Child cowered. In-between shone the constellation of the Great Bear, Bear-Child's mother who, since the earth was made, stood between him and those who would do him harm. The Canoe constellation crossed the sky. Never before in the static chase in the slow revolve of the infinite sky had such a thing occurred. Yet here it was. And that star, that new star—not only brighter but bigger by half than any star Bear-Child or his mother had ever seen—was leading the hunters, their canoe moving toward them with terrible speed.

On the spit of sand on the Earth World below where Claw of Spirit Bird Bay opened to the gulf, Henry dragged his canoe through small lapping waves out into rising surf. Athol was well ahead, paddling from the mid-section of his canoe, bagpipes and Birchbark Grail stowed safely in the stern beneath a square of canvas. Athol gained momentum with every stroke, veering off under starlight toward
Verum
, anchored slightly north of Henry's
Reconcilio
. Both ships lay quiet close to the central channel where the force of the outflowing tide, when it turned, would be greatest. Henry couldn't tell why Athol stopped rowing until his cousin raised his paddle, barely seen in the gathering dark as the eclipse approached apogee. Henry looked back and up.