Chapter 28: The Devil’s Chair
The stone had seemed immense by day, but at night, bereft of light, it seemed even more so: a giant diamond of blackness against the pale night sky. Conall touched it and was surprised to feel it warm, still harbouring the heat of the long summer’s day. His hands stroked the smooth skin of the stone, lichens scratching against his fingers as they skimmed over depressions and holes; he felt his way around to its southerly facing front. Here, clear in the light of the full moon that hung above Waden Hill, was a natural fissure in the massive rock - a cove in which was set a natural seat - a great stone chair. He sat on this natural throne, four thousand years old.
He took the hipflask from his pocket and swallowed a mouthful of whiskey, with a grimace. Then he poured a little on the stone beside him. Slainte. He said.
The bells of the church rang out for half eleven; she would be here soon.
‘So, have you tried it?’ a voice from his right side asked. He jumped and turned to see Shen gesturing towards the Devil’s chair.
‘No. I was waiting for you. Do we walk clockwise or anti-clockwise?’
Shen shrugged. ‘Let’s try both – but I’d go for anti-clockwise first – it is the Devil we’re summoning! God, what if he does appear?!’ her eyes widened. Conall just shook his head.
The two figures traced a circuit around the great stone three times in silence – first one way and then the other.
Finally, their circuits complete, Shen turned to Conall and shrugged. ‘Any sign?’
Conall he raised his eyebrows. ‘Maybe he’s been here all along.’ He grinned.
‘Maybe she has’ countered Shen. She looked up at him, amused. ‘Have you got any tobacco? I’m gasping for a smoke.’
‘What have you done with Shen?! You want some whiskey, too?’ he asked. Shen pulled a face.
‘I’m never drinking again. I’ve still got a headache from lunch’ She said.
He lit her cigarette, then his own.
‘Sorry I couldn’t make it earlier; I don’t know why he came back to mine. He doesn’t usually when he’s worked an early.’
‘Did he mind you coming out?’ Con asked.
She took a long drag on the cigarette and shrugged; ‘He wasn’t awake.’
They stood against the stone, looking towards the moon.
‘Do you believe in past lives?’ she asked suddenly. Conall paused, taken aback.
‘I don’t know. I sometimes have feelings about certain times in history. Maybe they’re some kind of memory. Or I’ve had dreams that seem to suggest it.’
A flash in the sky captured his attention.
‘I just saw a shooting star’ he said.
‘Did you make a wish?’ she asked. ‘What was it?’
‘I can’t say – or it won’t come true!’
‘Give me a clue!’ she said, in a mock whine.
‘No!’ he laughed. ‘What about you – past lives…?’
‘Yeah. I think so’
‘Like?’
She shrugged, but didn’t offer any more to the conversation.
They walked to the rear of the stone – Shen moved forward and pressed herself against the stone, much as Conall had done minutes before.
‘I speak to the stones. I hug them; sometimes it feels as if they’re talking back, some kind of vibration or humming. Do you think I’m mad?’
‘No, not at all.’
‘I’ve never told anyone that before.’
‘Why are you telling me?’ Conall asked, flattered.
There was silence, but then Shen began,
‘I don’t know. I don’t feel you’d judge me.’
‘I don’t judge you.’
They stood in silence for a while. Then Shen sat down with her back to the stone, while Conall traced another half-circuit and sat once more in the devil’s chair.
‘Can you hear me?’ he asked.
There was no response, so he stood up and walked around.
‘Did you hear me?’ he asked.
‘No, what did you say?’
‘I was just asking if you could hear me.’ He explained.
‘No.’ she repeated. ‘This is weird! It’s a lovely night – the plough is so clear!’
He looked up.
‘People always say that looking at the stars makes them feel so insignificant, but I don’t feel that.’ Shen said.
‘Me neither. Did you know 40% of those stars are younger than life on earth? Life here is a bloody miracle – and as far as we know it’s the only life; this planet is ancient and its life is sacred, holy – we are far from insignificant – if the cosmos is about producing complex life as far as we know we’re as complex as it gets and that makes us fucking important. Insignificant my arse! We’re what it’s all about.’
He felt a great swelling of emotion inside of him. ‘And we are all made from stars. Everything around us is; we are stars, and older than the stars. What kind of miracle allows stardust to know it exists and to feel joy at being alive?’
They stood together eyes aloft; but their senses more open to the proximity of the other.
‘Which one is the northern star, again?’ she asked.
‘Right – you see the Great Bear, the plough, saucepan, whatever – look at the two stars on the right – not the tail or handle but the ‘saucepan’ bit… now they point up to the Little Bear – it’s like a mini plough…’
‘Yeah, I can see it.’
‘The north star is the end of its tail.’
‘Oh – it’s not very bright, is it? I always thought the north star was the brightest star in the sky.’
Conall smiled. ‘No – and the north star, Polaris, only marks the north pole of the heavens now… when Avebury was built a completely different star marked the pole.’
‘I don’t get it.’
‘The position of the pole moves over time. Too slow to really notice, unless you lived to be a thousand or so, then you might notice it.’ He loved looking at the stars.
‘Which one?’ she asked.
‘Which one what?’
‘Was the pole star when the circle was built.’
‘Oh, it’s thuban in the constellation of Draco, the dragon – or serpent… but it’s hard to explain where it is, it’s not obvious. It’s kind of in the gaps between more obvious constellations.’
'Show me.’ She said, and he felt her hand slip into his.
Conall’s reticence was overruled by the soft pressure of her little hand; adamant not to lose that precious connection he stood beside her and pointed upwards.
‘Right – see that kind of diamond shape to the left of the plough? Well – to the left of the little bear, really.’
‘That bright one?’ Shen asked.
‘No…look’ and emboldened by her concentration he let go her hand and moved to stand behind her, extending his arm over her right shoulder and moved his face close to her own.
‘’There! Underneath that bright one… the diamond is its head…and you can see the rest of it going up, then to the right, and down and then back up – kind of separating the great and little bears, so the little bear is almost riding on its back…’ While Shen frowned at the sky in concentration Conall was only aware of one thing, the warmth of her cheek and her hair tickling the side of his face.
‘Why does it move? The Pole I mean.’
'It’s because the earth isn’t totally fixed like, say, a globe you get in a classroom – there’s a kind of wobble in its axis. What it means is that the earth doesn’t point to one exact point in the heavens but kind of moves in a small circle, over time - a long time – this corkscrewing actually is caused by the proximity of the moon and is very, very slow - 26,000 years for one full rotation actually. So, one day, in about 21,000 years the pole will be back near Thuban once more as it was 5000 years ago! Do you see?’
He felt her nod.
‘So what conclusion did you come to? With the PhD.’
‘You really want to know?’ he asked.
She nodded, her dark eyes open in anticipation.
‘It’s a bit boring.’ He said.
‘I’ll be the judge of that’.
He shrugged, turned and sat in the Devil’s Chair, and she sat cross-legged at his feet like a schoolchild.
‘You ever seen an Oliver Stone film?’ he said. ‘Like The Doors or JFK? There’s always a scene about halfway through that’s exposition heavy, to make sure the audience is on board with the import of what’s going on… it’s kind of lazy storytelling,’ he laughed; ‘You know, the bit where Kevin Costner is sitting on that bench near the Lincoln Memorial in Washington and that bloke in a hat, Donald Sutherland, tells him about how the killing of JFK was an inside job by weapons manufacturers because he’d wanted to stop the Vietnam War; or the bit in The Doors when they’re walking along the beach and Ray Manzarak is telling Jim Morrison how people are ready for their kind of vision because, it’s the 60s, man, Vietnam’s out there…’
‘So you’re going to tell me how Avebury is linked to Vietnam, man?’ Shen quipped.
‘You’re Garrison – that’s Costner, and I’m the man in the hat, Mr X…’
‘Donald Sutherland.’ She said.
Con gave her the thumbs up.
‘So here we go…’
‘I mean in a nutshell – in a sentence…’ she joked.
Con flicked her his middle finger. ‘Ok then then, Mrs Soundbite – the sites were built to line up with the Milky Way.’
She looked above her, seeking the Milky Way above; but frowned at her failure, the bright moonlight making it impossible to see any traces of it.
‘How…?’ she began.
‘Ah, no more info – you just wanted the soundbite. Leave it at that.’
‘Oh go on then, give me the lecture.’
And so Con told the story of his research:
…
Having dismissed the solstice, the summer solstice, at least, as the main object of orientation of the henges and passage-graves, Con had turned his attention to the direction of the entrances set in their high earthen banks, and had found that a large proportion were oriented north and south; close enough to north and south to lead many archaeologists to dismiss them as just badly aligned on the poles; yet far enough from them to suggest to Con that they can’t have been that bad at orienting their structures. The off-set had to be intentional – part of the design.
As he had explained to Wolf the day before, he had discovered in many sites a preoccupation with an orientation south, which, given their impressiveness, seemed most likely to have been on the stars of Crux, no longer visible in the night sky above the British isles because of precession; these stars formed a diamond shape, one found reflected again and again on examples of megalithic art, stretching from the Balkans to Britain, everywhere the new ‘invention’ of farming had spread… and often associated with a female figure.
Here at Avebury, he now told Shen, the diamond shaped stones of the Devil’s chair, forming the southern entrance, once aligned on the rising of Crux over Waden Hill; these same stars set, when viewed from the so-called obelisk, a large stone at the centre of the southern inner circle, where Silbury Hill lay.
‘So Silbury is a marker for the stars?’ Shen asked.
‘It’s a theory; another suggests it was put there after precession had led to the stars disappearance – as a kind of memory, a monument.’
The more he had looked, he continued, the more other sites were revealed as aligning on Crux – either its setting or rising.
‘Why just not one or the other?’ Shen asked.
‘It depends,’ he said, ‘on the orientation of local rivers… the henge entrances tend to mirror the direction of local rivers – probably so the ‘river’ in the sky will align to that on earth.’
Shen looked confused.
‘River in the sky?’
‘Sorry – I’m getting ahead of myself. The question I should answer next is ‘why Crux’? That’ll bring us to the river…’
The answer to Shen’s question concerning the river was tied in with Con’s own obsessions… for he had been investigating all of this in the months after his conversations with Melissa following his trip to Wales, when he’d become obsessed with what his dream had seemed to reveal about the building of Bryn Celli Ddu in line with the winter solstice sun, an alignment suggested by the appearance of the white horse. He’d become equally, if not more, obsessed with the image of the river of milk in which he’d bathed, created by the wand of the goddess with the three cows… potentially the River Braint that Melissa had said was linked to the stars in the sky, especially the W-shaped constellation of Cassiopeia that she had clled Llys Don, the ‘court of Don’, in Welsh.
‘Cassiopeia…’ he had said to her, in one of their conversations, of which over that winter there were many, ‘…is in the Milky Way… what if this Don, or
Danu in Irish, this Brigantia, was connected to the Milky Way? Might that be the river of milk in my dream?’
‘Jeez Con, I think it could be, couldn’t it?’
When the alignment of corridor of posts at Stonehenge turned out to be on Crux, a constellation also within the Milky Way he’d felt a giddy sense of inevitability; but it was also accompanied by panic – a sinking feeling he might be descending into magical thinking – into madness. But he was open-mouthed in wonder when he discovered that these two constellations, Cassiopeia and Crux, lay not only in the Milky Way but also at exact opposites of the sky – linked in a kind of see-saw motion that meant one rose as the other set, and vice versa. And just as the stars lay opposed, so too did the entrances of most henges.
The realisation and the possibility hit him in a single, beautiful, horrific moment: if certain henge entrances aligned on Crux then, as most henges tended to have opposing entrances, the northern-oriented entrances of these sites ought to align exactly on Cassiopeia… at the same moment in time! A few mad, manic, hours on his computer confirmed his intuition: the northern entrances aligned on Cassiopeia, Llys Don, the court of Danu, the w-shaped constellation whose pattern paralleled that, he now saw, the other most prominent Neolithic art motif aside from the lozenge: the zig-zag. Zig-zag and lozenge, Cassiopeia and Crux, opposed, rising and setting, and both within the Milky Way… he remembered excitedly emailing a picture to Melissa – of a standing stone from within the chamber of Barclodiad Y Gawres on Anglesey, further west than Bryn Celli Ddu, but a similar type of monument.
‘The chamber aligns on Cassiopeia, Mel, but looking in, from the outside, and you’re looking at Crux rising… and this carved stone sits in the passage!’
There, seeming to embody all he had discovered, was this anthropomorphic stone, with Ws above diamond shapes – both mirroring the constellations the passage seemed to be referencing, combined into a single image, with an eye-like spiral above.
The stone had seemed immense by day, but at night, bereft of light, it seemed even more so: a giant diamond of blackness against the pale night sky. Conall touched it and was surprised to feel it warm, still harbouring the heat of the long summer’s day. His hands stroked the smooth skin of the stone, lichens scratching against his fingers as they skimmed over depressions and holes; he felt his way around to its southerly facing front. Here, clear in the light of the full moon that hung above Waden Hill, was a natural fissure in the massive rock - a cove in which was set a natural seat - a great stone chair. He sat on this natural throne, four thousand years old.
He took the hipflask from his pocket and swallowed a mouthful of whiskey, with a grimace. Then he poured a little on the stone beside him. Slainte. He said.
The bells of the church rang out for half eleven; she would be here soon.
‘So, have you tried it?’ a voice from his right side asked. He jumped and turned to see Shen gesturing towards the Devil’s chair.
‘No. I was waiting for you. Do we walk clockwise or anti-clockwise?’
Shen shrugged. ‘Let’s try both – but I’d go for anti-clockwise first – it is the Devil we’re summoning! God, what if he does appear?!’ her eyes widened. Conall just shook his head.
The two figures traced a circuit around the great stone three times in silence – first one way and then the other.
Finally, their circuits complete, Shen turned to Conall and shrugged. ‘Any sign?’
Conall he raised his eyebrows. ‘Maybe he’s been here all along.’ He grinned.
‘Maybe she has’ countered Shen. She looked up at him, amused. ‘Have you got any tobacco? I’m gasping for a smoke.’
‘What have you done with Shen?! You want some whiskey, too?’ he asked. Shen pulled a face.
‘I’m never drinking again. I’ve still got a headache from lunch’ She said.
He lit her cigarette, then his own.
‘Sorry I couldn’t make it earlier; I don’t know why he came back to mine. He doesn’t usually when he’s worked an early.’
‘Did he mind you coming out?’ Con asked.
She took a long drag on the cigarette and shrugged; ‘He wasn’t awake.’
They stood against the stone, looking towards the moon.
‘Do you believe in past lives?’ she asked suddenly. Conall paused, taken aback.
‘I don’t know. I sometimes have feelings about certain times in history. Maybe they’re some kind of memory. Or I’ve had dreams that seem to suggest it.’
A flash in the sky captured his attention.
‘I just saw a shooting star’ he said.
‘Did you make a wish?’ she asked. ‘What was it?’
‘I can’t say – or it won’t come true!’
‘Give me a clue!’ she said, in a mock whine.
‘No!’ he laughed. ‘What about you – past lives…?’
‘Yeah. I think so’
‘Like?’
She shrugged, but didn’t offer any more to the conversation.
They walked to the rear of the stone – Shen moved forward and pressed herself against the stone, much as Conall had done minutes before.
‘I speak to the stones. I hug them; sometimes it feels as if they’re talking back, some kind of vibration or humming. Do you think I’m mad?’
‘No, not at all.’
‘I’ve never told anyone that before.’
‘Why are you telling me?’ Conall asked, flattered.
There was silence, but then Shen began,
‘I don’t know. I don’t feel you’d judge me.’
‘I don’t judge you.’
They stood in silence for a while. Then Shen sat down with her back to the stone, while Conall traced another half-circuit and sat once more in the devil’s chair.
‘Can you hear me?’ he asked.
There was no response, so he stood up and walked around.
‘Did you hear me?’ he asked.
‘No, what did you say?’
‘I was just asking if you could hear me.’ He explained.
‘No.’ she repeated. ‘This is weird! It’s a lovely night – the plough is so clear!’
He looked up.
‘People always say that looking at the stars makes them feel so insignificant, but I don’t feel that.’ Shen said.
‘Me neither. Did you know 40% of those stars are younger than life on earth? Life here is a bloody miracle – and as far as we know it’s the only life; this planet is ancient and its life is sacred, holy – we are far from insignificant – if the cosmos is about producing complex life as far as we know we’re as complex as it gets and that makes us fucking important. Insignificant my arse! We’re what it’s all about.’
He felt a great swelling of emotion inside of him. ‘And we are all made from stars. Everything around us is; we are stars, and older than the stars. What kind of miracle allows stardust to know it exists and to feel joy at being alive?’
They stood together eyes aloft; but their senses more open to the proximity of the other.
‘Which one is the northern star, again?’ she asked.
‘Right – you see the Great Bear, the plough, saucepan, whatever – look at the two stars on the right – not the tail or handle but the ‘saucepan’ bit… now they point up to the Little Bear – it’s like a mini plough…’
‘Yeah, I can see it.’
‘The north star is the end of its tail.’
‘Oh – it’s not very bright, is it? I always thought the north star was the brightest star in the sky.’
Conall smiled. ‘No – and the north star, Polaris, only marks the north pole of the heavens now… when Avebury was built a completely different star marked the pole.’
‘I don’t get it.’
‘The position of the pole moves over time. Too slow to really notice, unless you lived to be a thousand or so, then you might notice it.’ He loved looking at the stars.
‘Which one?’ she asked.
‘Which one what?’
‘Was the pole star when the circle was built.’
‘Oh, it’s thuban in the constellation of Draco, the dragon – or serpent… but it’s hard to explain where it is, it’s not obvious. It’s kind of in the gaps between more obvious constellations.’
'Show me.’ She said, and he felt her hand slip into his.
Conall’s reticence was overruled by the soft pressure of her little hand; adamant not to lose that precious connection he stood beside her and pointed upwards.
‘Right – see that kind of diamond shape to the left of the plough? Well – to the left of the little bear, really.’
‘That bright one?’ Shen asked.
‘No…look’ and emboldened by her concentration he let go her hand and moved to stand behind her, extending his arm over her right shoulder and moved his face close to her own.
‘’There! Underneath that bright one… the diamond is its head…and you can see the rest of it going up, then to the right, and down and then back up – kind of separating the great and little bears, so the little bear is almost riding on its back…’ While Shen frowned at the sky in concentration Conall was only aware of one thing, the warmth of her cheek and her hair tickling the side of his face.
‘Why does it move? The Pole I mean.’
'It’s because the earth isn’t totally fixed like, say, a globe you get in a classroom – there’s a kind of wobble in its axis. What it means is that the earth doesn’t point to one exact point in the heavens but kind of moves in a small circle, over time - a long time – this corkscrewing actually is caused by the proximity of the moon and is very, very slow - 26,000 years for one full rotation actually. So, one day, in about 21,000 years the pole will be back near Thuban once more as it was 5000 years ago! Do you see?’
He felt her nod.
‘So what conclusion did you come to? With the PhD.’
‘You really want to know?’ he asked.
She nodded, her dark eyes open in anticipation.
‘It’s a bit boring.’ He said.
‘I’ll be the judge of that’.
He shrugged, turned and sat in the Devil’s Chair, and she sat cross-legged at his feet like a schoolchild.
‘You ever seen an Oliver Stone film?’ he said. ‘Like The Doors or JFK? There’s always a scene about halfway through that’s exposition heavy, to make sure the audience is on board with the import of what’s going on… it’s kind of lazy storytelling,’ he laughed; ‘You know, the bit where Kevin Costner is sitting on that bench near the Lincoln Memorial in Washington and that bloke in a hat, Donald Sutherland, tells him about how the killing of JFK was an inside job by weapons manufacturers because he’d wanted to stop the Vietnam War; or the bit in The Doors when they’re walking along the beach and Ray Manzarak is telling Jim Morrison how people are ready for their kind of vision because, it’s the 60s, man, Vietnam’s out there…’
‘So you’re going to tell me how Avebury is linked to Vietnam, man?’ Shen quipped.
‘You’re Garrison – that’s Costner, and I’m the man in the hat, Mr X…’
‘Donald Sutherland.’ She said.
Con gave her the thumbs up.
‘So here we go…’
‘I mean in a nutshell – in a sentence…’ she joked.
Con flicked her his middle finger. ‘Ok then then, Mrs Soundbite – the sites were built to line up with the Milky Way.’
She looked above her, seeking the Milky Way above; but frowned at her failure, the bright moonlight making it impossible to see any traces of it.
‘How…?’ she began.
‘Ah, no more info – you just wanted the soundbite. Leave it at that.’
‘Oh go on then, give me the lecture.’
And so Con told the story of his research:
…
Having dismissed the solstice, the summer solstice, at least, as the main object of orientation of the henges and passage-graves, Con had turned his attention to the direction of the entrances set in their high earthen banks, and had found that a large proportion were oriented north and south; close enough to north and south to lead many archaeologists to dismiss them as just badly aligned on the poles; yet far enough from them to suggest to Con that they can’t have been that bad at orienting their structures. The off-set had to be intentional – part of the design.
As he had explained to Wolf the day before, he had discovered in many sites a preoccupation with an orientation south, which, given their impressiveness, seemed most likely to have been on the stars of Crux, no longer visible in the night sky above the British isles because of precession; these stars formed a diamond shape, one found reflected again and again on examples of megalithic art, stretching from the Balkans to Britain, everywhere the new ‘invention’ of farming had spread… and often associated with a female figure.
Here at Avebury, he now told Shen, the diamond shaped stones of the Devil’s chair, forming the southern entrance, once aligned on the rising of Crux over Waden Hill; these same stars set, when viewed from the so-called obelisk, a large stone at the centre of the southern inner circle, where Silbury Hill lay.
‘So Silbury is a marker for the stars?’ Shen asked.
‘It’s a theory; another suggests it was put there after precession had led to the stars disappearance – as a kind of memory, a monument.’
The more he had looked, he continued, the more other sites were revealed as aligning on Crux – either its setting or rising.
‘Why just not one or the other?’ Shen asked.
‘It depends,’ he said, ‘on the orientation of local rivers… the henge entrances tend to mirror the direction of local rivers – probably so the ‘river’ in the sky will align to that on earth.’
Shen looked confused.
‘River in the sky?’
‘Sorry – I’m getting ahead of myself. The question I should answer next is ‘why Crux’? That’ll bring us to the river…’
The answer to Shen’s question concerning the river was tied in with Con’s own obsessions… for he had been investigating all of this in the months after his conversations with Melissa following his trip to Wales, when he’d become obsessed with what his dream had seemed to reveal about the building of Bryn Celli Ddu in line with the winter solstice sun, an alignment suggested by the appearance of the white horse. He’d become equally, if not more, obsessed with the image of the river of milk in which he’d bathed, created by the wand of the goddess with the three cows… potentially the River Braint that Melissa had said was linked to the stars in the sky, especially the W-shaped constellation of Cassiopeia that she had clled Llys Don, the ‘court of Don’, in Welsh.
‘Cassiopeia…’ he had said to her, in one of their conversations, of which over that winter there were many, ‘…is in the Milky Way… what if this Don, or
Danu in Irish, this Brigantia, was connected to the Milky Way? Might that be the river of milk in my dream?’
‘Jeez Con, I think it could be, couldn’t it?’
When the alignment of corridor of posts at Stonehenge turned out to be on Crux, a constellation also within the Milky Way he’d felt a giddy sense of inevitability; but it was also accompanied by panic – a sinking feeling he might be descending into magical thinking – into madness. But he was open-mouthed in wonder when he discovered that these two constellations, Cassiopeia and Crux, lay not only in the Milky Way but also at exact opposites of the sky – linked in a kind of see-saw motion that meant one rose as the other set, and vice versa. And just as the stars lay opposed, so too did the entrances of most henges.
The realisation and the possibility hit him in a single, beautiful, horrific moment: if certain henge entrances aligned on Crux then, as most henges tended to have opposing entrances, the northern-oriented entrances of these sites ought to align exactly on Cassiopeia… at the same moment in time! A few mad, manic, hours on his computer confirmed his intuition: the northern entrances aligned on Cassiopeia, Llys Don, the court of Danu, the w-shaped constellation whose pattern paralleled that, he now saw, the other most prominent Neolithic art motif aside from the lozenge: the zig-zag. Zig-zag and lozenge, Cassiopeia and Crux, opposed, rising and setting, and both within the Milky Way… he remembered excitedly emailing a picture to Melissa – of a standing stone from within the chamber of Barclodiad Y Gawres on Anglesey, further west than Bryn Celli Ddu, but a similar type of monument.
‘The chamber aligns on Cassiopeia, Mel, but looking in, from the outside, and you’re looking at Crux rising… and this carved stone sits in the passage!’
There, seeming to embody all he had discovered, was this anthropomorphic stone, with Ws above diamond shapes – both mirroring the constellations the passage seemed to be referencing, combined into a single image, with an eye-like spiral above.
‘And in those days, before light pollution,’ he explained, ‘the Milky Way would have been brilliant; almost as bright as a full moon… like a great white path across the sky.’
‘So why not at Bryn celli?’ she had asked, puzzled as to why her favourite site didn’t overly fit the pattern.
‘But it does, the original henge, Mel – it’s oriented on the setting of Crux and rising of Cassiopeia.’ She had been delighted.
This sudden interest in the Milky Way had been further prompted by an Irish tale he’d stumbled upon, one that’s seemed to correspond to his dream, revolving, as it did, around 3 magical cows and a female who made a river turn into milk.
It was, to his mind, the key myth in all of this – the key to the henges…
He had told it to Mel that night. It was a legend called The Death of CuRoi. The tale recounted how a gigantic man (actually a demigod) named Cu Roi mac Dairi had aided the men of Ulster in a raid, but because he was not paid for his services he seized the chief plunder, namely a woman named Blathnat, meaning ‘flowers’, the three cows of luchna (that could each produce the milk of 30 cows) and a magical cauldron; and Cu Roi had fled back to his home in Kerry bearing the spoils. The Ulster hero Cúchulainn, lover of Blathnat, had pursued Cu Roi. He secretly met with Blathnat and together they arranged a ruse by which Cu Roi could be killed and Blathnat, her cows and her cauldron rescued. Blathnat advised Cu Roi that he should build an enclosure for his stronghold of standing-stones, accordingly he sent his men away to fetch building materials leaving his stronghold undefended. Blathnat had agreed that when Cu Roi was at his most vulnerable she would send a signal to Cúchulainn who was in hiding, by pouring the milk of her magical cows, gathered in her magical cauldron, down the river, henceforward named “Finnglas” - ‘White Flecked’, that ran through the stronghold. Blathnat bathed Cu Roi and bound his hair to his bedpost, then poured the milk in the stream and opened the stronghold doors. Cúchulainn entered, cut off Cu Roi’s head, and so regained the spoils lost to Cu Roi… the cauldron, the cows, and the flower-maiden…
‘Cu Roi’s fort is described in the tale ‘Bricriu’s Feast’ as revolving as swiftly as a mill-stone. It moves in a manner suggestive of the sky revolving around the pole.’ Con explained to her.
‘By extension, if the fort is the turning sky, or a site associated with the sky, and the tale itself suggests it is constructed of standing stones, then what else is the river of milk running through it but the Milky Way?’
The same imagery, he told her, appeared in the Welsh myth of Culhwch and Olwen, that concerned the rescue of the heroine Olwen from her giant father Yspaddaden, who was, like Cu Roi, beheaded at her release. Her name meant ‘white track’, and this was said to be because white trefoils sprung up where she trod – ‘But the white path is a visual trope,’ Con enthused; ‘it is arguably the same as the river of milk, an analogue of the Milky Way!’
But there was more, he said, his voice hoarse from talking… Amaterasu, the Japanese sun-goddess, she hid in a cave in the cosmic river to escape the insults of her brother, bringing about winter. The other gods assembled at the heavenly river to trick the sun-goddess out of hiding in hope of restoring life to the world: they began to dance and sing outside the cave until a goddess named Uzume exposed her genitals as she did so, causing other the gods to shake with laughter. Amaterasu, out of curiosity, peered round the door, whereon the gods held up a mirror, and seeing what she believed was a rival goddess outside, Amaterasu stepped out allowing her to be seized by one god, while another locked the cave door shut with string behind her.
Uzume’s dance was performed over the river of heaven, in other words, over the Milky Way, which she was later offered as a gift of thanks for helping release the sun; it was, then, in an astronomically-derived myth. The name Uzume meant ‘whirling heavenly woman’, and it seeemd possible to Con that she was derived from an image of a female-formed Milky Way turning about the earth’s axis nightly, and so appearing to ‘dance’ in the heavens.
‘Like your Brigantia, Mel… with her star-stones in the river… Brigantia! The High One! You said she was in the stars!’
Con had gone on to suggest an original myth in which the ‘dance’ of the Milky Way Goddess in the night sky presaged the release of the sun goddess, who emerged on the horizon from her underworld prison. Uzume’s lewd dance, Con suggested, had an astronomical origin: it referred to the appearance of Crux, the diamond-shaped constellation that echoed the lozenge shape found on female images from the Near East to Britain, such as the stone from Barclodiad y Gawres, and always shown in relation to the womb – was Crux seen as a great cosmic starry womb or vulva, a diamond in the sky…Up above the world so high?
His subsequent research had uncovered something that suggested this was indeed the case – and, in the circle of Avebury this summer night, he stood from the Devil’s Chair before the cross-legged Shen, and began explaining it in his excitement.
…
‘You see, I think this myth, the release of the sun-maiden, goes right back to the start of farming in the Near East – and if we look at the sky back then, around 7000 BC in Anatolia,’ he said, his hand outstretched in the general direction of east, ‘then we find that the midwinter sun rises on the exact point on the horizon that Crux rises in that era! The sun rises from out of the womb of the Milky Way goddess! It’s the same image we find in Egypt where the sun is born every morning on the horizon from out of the womb of Nut or Hathor, the sky goddess who is both Milky Way and the river Nile!’ he was grinning like a fool, caught up in his ideas.
‘And Cassiopeia?’ Shen asked, also intrigued by his ideas, but more amused at his fervour, ‘what’s that?’
‘Her breasts.’ He said, pointng out the w-shape in the air with his finger. ‘Llys Don, the court of Danu… Danu comes from an old Indo-European word, it means ‘she who gives milk’…the whole of the Milky Way was a goddess, just as in Egypt, Shen. And she dances her revealing dance prior to the rising of the sun – you see, for most of the year the nights are too short to see both the rising and setting of the Milky Way, but at midwinter this isn’t the case – you can see the whole ‘dance’, and this acted as a signal that the solstice was near and the sun about to be reborn... the sun rises shorty after Crux sets. Hence the ‘sign’ given to CuChulainn by Blathnat is of a milky river; it’s the same image it’s saying: look for the turning of the Milky Way in the heavens and be ready for the release of the sun.’
The river of milk… why had he dreamed this? What meaning did it have for him? Was something trying to communicate with him across time, and if so, then who or what? Or was it, as he had said to Shen earlier, a ripple caused from a future event… because of the tragedy he presumed the dream had caused?
‘You said something before about the entrances aligning to rivers on earth?’ Shen recalled.
He nodded. While some henge sites did, indeed, have rivers running through them (such as Marden), what the results of his research suggested was that what was being referred to in these tales was the ‘heavenly’ ‘milky’ river that ran ‘through’ the henges – in that the entrances align on the rising and setting points of this celestial feature – joining entrance to entrance in a shining band across the winter sky. A river running through the henge, albeit it a stellar river, like a starry rainbow, arching overhead. And in most cases the location of nearby earthly rivers seemed to influence the orinetation of the entrances, choosing to orient on the rising or setting of the Milky Way to better align with the local rivers…one reflecting the other…
As above, so below.
‘Although it’s never that simple…’ he laughed;’ there’s more – there’s the fact that the situation was slightly different in sites in Orkney where Crux was no longer visible due to the latitude and where instead we see alignments on the star Sirius, which had taken on the former position of Crux at the rising point of the midwinter sun by 3000 BC. And there’s alignments on Orion; Orion is the hero Cuchulainn who saves the sun in the Blathnat myth; basically the myth refers to the fact that in the Neolithic period the spring sun rose on Orion’s shoulders, so he carried her from out of the underworld like St Christopher, carrying the sun, so it would have appeared, across the Milky Way, hence St Christopher carries Christ over a river…but I don’t want to bog you down in details,’ he said, unaware he’d already spent some 20 minutes babbling at her as if he’d mainlined twenty espressos.
‘But imagine…’ he said – arms spread wide… ‘on midwinter’s eve, just after sunset, the Milky Way rings the horizon, just as Crux rises and Cassiopeia sets… rings it in a circle, just as the chalk-white banks of the henge encircled the centre… probably where the whole idea of a circle came from… then later it rises, like the handle of a basket it joins entrance to entrance, like a rainbow… a river running through the henge… and to pass through the entrance is to enter the river in the sky! It’s a doorway to the stars – a star-gate, if you will! Like Jacob’s Ladder… perhaps…a place to ascend to the heavens or for the heavens to descend to the earth… ’
All fell quiet within the circle. Con’s lecture was over, and he leant back against the Devil’s chair, spent.
’Does it make sense?’ he asked Shen, suddenly tentative, vulnerable for putting his ideas out to another; worried it all might be his twisted imaginings based on the misreading of a dream, given more worth than it should normally have had through its association with grief.
‘I’m no archaeologist, Con, but it seems to make sense, to hold together. So why doesn’t anyone else mention it? I mean, it seems obvious, so why hasn’t anyone seen it before?’
Con shrugged. ‘No one’s interested, maybe – or never seen the Milky Way! Or not interested in myth, I don’t know. I have wondered. Maybe after the whole summer solstice Stonehenge thing they just concentrated on the sun and moon, not expecting stars to have played a role in the sites.’
‘It’s basically, then, a calendar, then?’ she said. ‘To mark the return of fertility and the coming of Spring?’ She sounded slightly disappointed.
‘No! I don’t think it’s that simple.’ he said. ‘Most churches are supposed to orient on the spring equinox sunrise… and Easter is all about rebirth in the spring, but you wouldn’t say Christianity is basically calendrical - there’s always a spiritual component to such myths. You see in other cultures there were traditions known as the Mysteries – like those of Demeter and Persephone in which the rescue of the prisoner from underworld offered hope of rebirth to their followers – Those who die before they die do not die when they die… as the saying goes; and I mean offered a sense, an experience. of immortality. Imagine if Avebury had been the site of the British Mysteries – connected, at least somehow, to rebirth, be that experienced in life through some kind of mystery initiation, or in death…’
He paused. ‘A site for the dead, perhaps – I’ve not discounted that – that these sites were connected to the afterlife or to the post-mortem world; like the pyramids; not a tomb as such… but maybe a place for spiritual transformation; or place for spirits to congregate, rather than the living… like I said, it’s an interface between earth and sky – a crossing point; a star-gate… it’s just a hunch at the moment… this research, you know, it’s not finished… just started really; I’ve discovered what I believe they were aligned on – but not necessarily why… do you sometimes feel you’re trespassing here? Especially at night – that you don’t belong; that it belongs to the Dead?’
…
‘Which reminds me…The past lives thing,’ he said.
She nodded, encouraging him to go on.
‘When I was a kid I had this dream; there was a load of us on a boat, a wooden boat, and we were escaping from this coastline and I remember looking up and seeing flames and the sky lit up orange – there was lava, I think, and the cliffs were collapsing around us into the sea- and the boat was being tossed by the waves; I don’t know whether it was stormy or if it was just the collapse of the land around us; and then the next scene I was in a desert, I think – I was a man, a grown up, and there was a woman beside me and we were looking at a temple – like an Egyptian temple, rectangular with great columns - and I said to the woman we could rest now, now that we had preserved the knowledge that had been lost when the land in the sea had been destroyed…’
‘Woah. Really?’
‘Yeah – I mean it was a dream but if felt real – felt like a memory; the view of the destruction of the island was incredible; it was sublime; horrific.’
‘That’s so weird – I’ve got something to say but you mustn’t laugh…’
‘Try me.’
‘One of the reasons I was so happy to move here was because it’s high up and away from the sea… all the time on the Scillies I was overwhelmed with a fear of tidal waves; I’ve always had it. Even as a child when I saw a bank of cloud on the horizon I’d imagine it was a wave and it would scare the hell out of me; even the banks here, sometimes they feel like a wall of water rushing towards me, like a massive flood… do you think I’m mad?’
‘God no! There used to be this picture of a tidal wave in a book I had as a kid – there were people on the beach looking out, too late to run, and then this wall of water rushing towards them; it fascinated me and scared me and I linked it to this dream… I don’t know, maybe it’s a common fear; I would be worried if I lived in the Scillies – they’re supposed to be the last vestiges of a once great kingdom called Lyonesse that was lost to the sea.’
‘Is that true?’
‘Yes – they were once part of the mainland; there are prehistoric tombs under the water there that used to be on dry land. It’s said you can still hear the church bells ringing from beneath the ocean.’
Shen shuddered.
‘Who was the woman in your dream?’ She asked.
Con didn’t know how to say it; didn’t know if somehow recent events had laid some kind of pattern upon this ancient dream;
‘She was short, with long dark hair.’ He said. She was you, he thought, he hoped.
And she was close and looking up at him; he could almost feel the warmth from her face against his cheeks; in the distance the bells of the church began to chime midnight.
‘The bells of drowned Lyonesse.’ He said. A slight breeze lifted her hair; tumbled across her forehead, curling in the wind – his sister’s hair. He stepped back, smiling weakly; Shen looked distant all of a sudden.
‘Are you happy, Shen?’ He suddenly asked.
She shrugged. ‘I’m not unhappy.’ looking down at her feet. ‘I don’t know what I want. I don’t know where I belong. I sometimes think I should move away; even go to Canada and find my relatives there.’
‘What about Hayden?’
She shrugged. ‘What about him? I don’t love Hayden. Maybe I’ve never really loved anyone… I don’t know why I’m telling you this.’
‘Because I listen?’ he stammered, feeling her admission of never having loved as a personal, physical blow.
She looked as if she wanted to reply, but instead she looked away, frowning.
Then she returned to look up at him; and for a moment there seemed to be a connection, but he faltered, and his eyes flicked away, his feelings, like a ball of tension, a mixture of fear, hope, guilt, seemed to stick in his throat, stopping his breath; and he stepped back.
‘Look. It’s late. If Hayden wakes he’s going to wonder where I am. I have to go; she said, her voice terse.
‘I’ll see you at the protest?’ he said as she walked away. She didn’t answer.
‘Shen?’
She waved without looking round. ‘I’m tired Con, I’ll see you tomorrow.’
‘So why not at Bryn celli?’ she had asked, puzzled as to why her favourite site didn’t overly fit the pattern.
‘But it does, the original henge, Mel – it’s oriented on the setting of Crux and rising of Cassiopeia.’ She had been delighted.
This sudden interest in the Milky Way had been further prompted by an Irish tale he’d stumbled upon, one that’s seemed to correspond to his dream, revolving, as it did, around 3 magical cows and a female who made a river turn into milk.
It was, to his mind, the key myth in all of this – the key to the henges…
He had told it to Mel that night. It was a legend called The Death of CuRoi. The tale recounted how a gigantic man (actually a demigod) named Cu Roi mac Dairi had aided the men of Ulster in a raid, but because he was not paid for his services he seized the chief plunder, namely a woman named Blathnat, meaning ‘flowers’, the three cows of luchna (that could each produce the milk of 30 cows) and a magical cauldron; and Cu Roi had fled back to his home in Kerry bearing the spoils. The Ulster hero Cúchulainn, lover of Blathnat, had pursued Cu Roi. He secretly met with Blathnat and together they arranged a ruse by which Cu Roi could be killed and Blathnat, her cows and her cauldron rescued. Blathnat advised Cu Roi that he should build an enclosure for his stronghold of standing-stones, accordingly he sent his men away to fetch building materials leaving his stronghold undefended. Blathnat had agreed that when Cu Roi was at his most vulnerable she would send a signal to Cúchulainn who was in hiding, by pouring the milk of her magical cows, gathered in her magical cauldron, down the river, henceforward named “Finnglas” - ‘White Flecked’, that ran through the stronghold. Blathnat bathed Cu Roi and bound his hair to his bedpost, then poured the milk in the stream and opened the stronghold doors. Cúchulainn entered, cut off Cu Roi’s head, and so regained the spoils lost to Cu Roi… the cauldron, the cows, and the flower-maiden…
‘Cu Roi’s fort is described in the tale ‘Bricriu’s Feast’ as revolving as swiftly as a mill-stone. It moves in a manner suggestive of the sky revolving around the pole.’ Con explained to her.
‘By extension, if the fort is the turning sky, or a site associated with the sky, and the tale itself suggests it is constructed of standing stones, then what else is the river of milk running through it but the Milky Way?’
The same imagery, he told her, appeared in the Welsh myth of Culhwch and Olwen, that concerned the rescue of the heroine Olwen from her giant father Yspaddaden, who was, like Cu Roi, beheaded at her release. Her name meant ‘white track’, and this was said to be because white trefoils sprung up where she trod – ‘But the white path is a visual trope,’ Con enthused; ‘it is arguably the same as the river of milk, an analogue of the Milky Way!’
But there was more, he said, his voice hoarse from talking… Amaterasu, the Japanese sun-goddess, she hid in a cave in the cosmic river to escape the insults of her brother, bringing about winter. The other gods assembled at the heavenly river to trick the sun-goddess out of hiding in hope of restoring life to the world: they began to dance and sing outside the cave until a goddess named Uzume exposed her genitals as she did so, causing other the gods to shake with laughter. Amaterasu, out of curiosity, peered round the door, whereon the gods held up a mirror, and seeing what she believed was a rival goddess outside, Amaterasu stepped out allowing her to be seized by one god, while another locked the cave door shut with string behind her.
Uzume’s dance was performed over the river of heaven, in other words, over the Milky Way, which she was later offered as a gift of thanks for helping release the sun; it was, then, in an astronomically-derived myth. The name Uzume meant ‘whirling heavenly woman’, and it seeemd possible to Con that she was derived from an image of a female-formed Milky Way turning about the earth’s axis nightly, and so appearing to ‘dance’ in the heavens.
‘Like your Brigantia, Mel… with her star-stones in the river… Brigantia! The High One! You said she was in the stars!’
Con had gone on to suggest an original myth in which the ‘dance’ of the Milky Way Goddess in the night sky presaged the release of the sun goddess, who emerged on the horizon from her underworld prison. Uzume’s lewd dance, Con suggested, had an astronomical origin: it referred to the appearance of Crux, the diamond-shaped constellation that echoed the lozenge shape found on female images from the Near East to Britain, such as the stone from Barclodiad y Gawres, and always shown in relation to the womb – was Crux seen as a great cosmic starry womb or vulva, a diamond in the sky…Up above the world so high?
His subsequent research had uncovered something that suggested this was indeed the case – and, in the circle of Avebury this summer night, he stood from the Devil’s Chair before the cross-legged Shen, and began explaining it in his excitement.
…
‘You see, I think this myth, the release of the sun-maiden, goes right back to the start of farming in the Near East – and if we look at the sky back then, around 7000 BC in Anatolia,’ he said, his hand outstretched in the general direction of east, ‘then we find that the midwinter sun rises on the exact point on the horizon that Crux rises in that era! The sun rises from out of the womb of the Milky Way goddess! It’s the same image we find in Egypt where the sun is born every morning on the horizon from out of the womb of Nut or Hathor, the sky goddess who is both Milky Way and the river Nile!’ he was grinning like a fool, caught up in his ideas.
‘And Cassiopeia?’ Shen asked, also intrigued by his ideas, but more amused at his fervour, ‘what’s that?’
‘Her breasts.’ He said, pointng out the w-shape in the air with his finger. ‘Llys Don, the court of Danu… Danu comes from an old Indo-European word, it means ‘she who gives milk’…the whole of the Milky Way was a goddess, just as in Egypt, Shen. And she dances her revealing dance prior to the rising of the sun – you see, for most of the year the nights are too short to see both the rising and setting of the Milky Way, but at midwinter this isn’t the case – you can see the whole ‘dance’, and this acted as a signal that the solstice was near and the sun about to be reborn... the sun rises shorty after Crux sets. Hence the ‘sign’ given to CuChulainn by Blathnat is of a milky river; it’s the same image it’s saying: look for the turning of the Milky Way in the heavens and be ready for the release of the sun.’
The river of milk… why had he dreamed this? What meaning did it have for him? Was something trying to communicate with him across time, and if so, then who or what? Or was it, as he had said to Shen earlier, a ripple caused from a future event… because of the tragedy he presumed the dream had caused?
‘You said something before about the entrances aligning to rivers on earth?’ Shen recalled.
He nodded. While some henge sites did, indeed, have rivers running through them (such as Marden), what the results of his research suggested was that what was being referred to in these tales was the ‘heavenly’ ‘milky’ river that ran ‘through’ the henges – in that the entrances align on the rising and setting points of this celestial feature – joining entrance to entrance in a shining band across the winter sky. A river running through the henge, albeit it a stellar river, like a starry rainbow, arching overhead. And in most cases the location of nearby earthly rivers seemed to influence the orinetation of the entrances, choosing to orient on the rising or setting of the Milky Way to better align with the local rivers…one reflecting the other…
As above, so below.
‘Although it’s never that simple…’ he laughed;’ there’s more – there’s the fact that the situation was slightly different in sites in Orkney where Crux was no longer visible due to the latitude and where instead we see alignments on the star Sirius, which had taken on the former position of Crux at the rising point of the midwinter sun by 3000 BC. And there’s alignments on Orion; Orion is the hero Cuchulainn who saves the sun in the Blathnat myth; basically the myth refers to the fact that in the Neolithic period the spring sun rose on Orion’s shoulders, so he carried her from out of the underworld like St Christopher, carrying the sun, so it would have appeared, across the Milky Way, hence St Christopher carries Christ over a river…but I don’t want to bog you down in details,’ he said, unaware he’d already spent some 20 minutes babbling at her as if he’d mainlined twenty espressos.
‘But imagine…’ he said – arms spread wide… ‘on midwinter’s eve, just after sunset, the Milky Way rings the horizon, just as Crux rises and Cassiopeia sets… rings it in a circle, just as the chalk-white banks of the henge encircled the centre… probably where the whole idea of a circle came from… then later it rises, like the handle of a basket it joins entrance to entrance, like a rainbow… a river running through the henge… and to pass through the entrance is to enter the river in the sky! It’s a doorway to the stars – a star-gate, if you will! Like Jacob’s Ladder… perhaps…a place to ascend to the heavens or for the heavens to descend to the earth… ’
All fell quiet within the circle. Con’s lecture was over, and he leant back against the Devil’s chair, spent.
’Does it make sense?’ he asked Shen, suddenly tentative, vulnerable for putting his ideas out to another; worried it all might be his twisted imaginings based on the misreading of a dream, given more worth than it should normally have had through its association with grief.
‘I’m no archaeologist, Con, but it seems to make sense, to hold together. So why doesn’t anyone else mention it? I mean, it seems obvious, so why hasn’t anyone seen it before?’
Con shrugged. ‘No one’s interested, maybe – or never seen the Milky Way! Or not interested in myth, I don’t know. I have wondered. Maybe after the whole summer solstice Stonehenge thing they just concentrated on the sun and moon, not expecting stars to have played a role in the sites.’
‘It’s basically, then, a calendar, then?’ she said. ‘To mark the return of fertility and the coming of Spring?’ She sounded slightly disappointed.
‘No! I don’t think it’s that simple.’ he said. ‘Most churches are supposed to orient on the spring equinox sunrise… and Easter is all about rebirth in the spring, but you wouldn’t say Christianity is basically calendrical - there’s always a spiritual component to such myths. You see in other cultures there were traditions known as the Mysteries – like those of Demeter and Persephone in which the rescue of the prisoner from underworld offered hope of rebirth to their followers – Those who die before they die do not die when they die… as the saying goes; and I mean offered a sense, an experience. of immortality. Imagine if Avebury had been the site of the British Mysteries – connected, at least somehow, to rebirth, be that experienced in life through some kind of mystery initiation, or in death…’
He paused. ‘A site for the dead, perhaps – I’ve not discounted that – that these sites were connected to the afterlife or to the post-mortem world; like the pyramids; not a tomb as such… but maybe a place for spiritual transformation; or place for spirits to congregate, rather than the living… like I said, it’s an interface between earth and sky – a crossing point; a star-gate… it’s just a hunch at the moment… this research, you know, it’s not finished… just started really; I’ve discovered what I believe they were aligned on – but not necessarily why… do you sometimes feel you’re trespassing here? Especially at night – that you don’t belong; that it belongs to the Dead?’
…
‘Which reminds me…The past lives thing,’ he said.
She nodded, encouraging him to go on.
‘When I was a kid I had this dream; there was a load of us on a boat, a wooden boat, and we were escaping from this coastline and I remember looking up and seeing flames and the sky lit up orange – there was lava, I think, and the cliffs were collapsing around us into the sea- and the boat was being tossed by the waves; I don’t know whether it was stormy or if it was just the collapse of the land around us; and then the next scene I was in a desert, I think – I was a man, a grown up, and there was a woman beside me and we were looking at a temple – like an Egyptian temple, rectangular with great columns - and I said to the woman we could rest now, now that we had preserved the knowledge that had been lost when the land in the sea had been destroyed…’
‘Woah. Really?’
‘Yeah – I mean it was a dream but if felt real – felt like a memory; the view of the destruction of the island was incredible; it was sublime; horrific.’
‘That’s so weird – I’ve got something to say but you mustn’t laugh…’
‘Try me.’
‘One of the reasons I was so happy to move here was because it’s high up and away from the sea… all the time on the Scillies I was overwhelmed with a fear of tidal waves; I’ve always had it. Even as a child when I saw a bank of cloud on the horizon I’d imagine it was a wave and it would scare the hell out of me; even the banks here, sometimes they feel like a wall of water rushing towards me, like a massive flood… do you think I’m mad?’
‘God no! There used to be this picture of a tidal wave in a book I had as a kid – there were people on the beach looking out, too late to run, and then this wall of water rushing towards them; it fascinated me and scared me and I linked it to this dream… I don’t know, maybe it’s a common fear; I would be worried if I lived in the Scillies – they’re supposed to be the last vestiges of a once great kingdom called Lyonesse that was lost to the sea.’
‘Is that true?’
‘Yes – they were once part of the mainland; there are prehistoric tombs under the water there that used to be on dry land. It’s said you can still hear the church bells ringing from beneath the ocean.’
Shen shuddered.
‘Who was the woman in your dream?’ She asked.
Con didn’t know how to say it; didn’t know if somehow recent events had laid some kind of pattern upon this ancient dream;
‘She was short, with long dark hair.’ He said. She was you, he thought, he hoped.
And she was close and looking up at him; he could almost feel the warmth from her face against his cheeks; in the distance the bells of the church began to chime midnight.
‘The bells of drowned Lyonesse.’ He said. A slight breeze lifted her hair; tumbled across her forehead, curling in the wind – his sister’s hair. He stepped back, smiling weakly; Shen looked distant all of a sudden.
‘Are you happy, Shen?’ He suddenly asked.
She shrugged. ‘I’m not unhappy.’ looking down at her feet. ‘I don’t know what I want. I don’t know where I belong. I sometimes think I should move away; even go to Canada and find my relatives there.’
‘What about Hayden?’
She shrugged. ‘What about him? I don’t love Hayden. Maybe I’ve never really loved anyone… I don’t know why I’m telling you this.’
‘Because I listen?’ he stammered, feeling her admission of never having loved as a personal, physical blow.
She looked as if she wanted to reply, but instead she looked away, frowning.
Then she returned to look up at him; and for a moment there seemed to be a connection, but he faltered, and his eyes flicked away, his feelings, like a ball of tension, a mixture of fear, hope, guilt, seemed to stick in his throat, stopping his breath; and he stepped back.
‘Look. It’s late. If Hayden wakes he’s going to wonder where I am. I have to go; she said, her voice terse.
‘I’ll see you at the protest?’ he said as she walked away. She didn’t answer.
‘Shen?’
She waved without looking round. ‘I’m tired Con, I’ll see you tomorrow.’