should press on to the Bone House. First things first.”
“Whatever you say, captain,” replied Wilhelmina.
Returning to the valley floor, he led them along the river to a nearby trail that climbed up the cliffside and out of the gorge. “This is the way out,” he said. “The Bone House is up on high ground in the middle of the forest just beyond the canyon rim.”
Kit pushed a relentless pace up and out of the gorge and wasted no time making for the place where he had helped the young clansmen erect the shelter made from the skeletal remains of animals. He had no difficulty finding the place; the crevice where they had gathered the bones was still there, as was the wide circular clearing in the woods.
But the Bone House itself was gone, and in its place was an enormous yew tree with shaggy brown bark and short needles of deepest green. The tree’s trunk was gigantic-a half dozen people or more would have been required to link hands to reach around it.
“Well,” concluded Kit unhappily, “needless to say, this was not here before.” He shook his head. “Look at this thing.” He indicated the great spreading branches, dark in the gloaming wood. “It’s a thousand years old if it’s a day!”
Mina and Brother Lazarus gazed at the tree and at the blue patch of sky above. The light was fading fast.
“Dies ist der Ort, sind Sie sicher?” asked the priest.
“He’s asking if you’re sure this is the place,” translated Mina. She started pacing off the distance around the massive yew.
“Yes-I mean, I think so,” replied Kit. He gazed around the almost perfect circle of the clearing. “This is it. This is where the Bone House stood. But obviously we’re way off course. It looks like we’ll have to go back and start over.”
“Maybe not,” said Mina.
“What do you mean?”
“Check your ley lamp, Kit.”
He pulled the device from his pocket to see that it was shining with an intense blue light. “I knew it! The ley is here all right. That hasn’t changed.”
Mina completed her circuit of the tree and came to stand beside Kit, ley lamp in hand. They held the two gizmos together; the blue lights combined to bathe their faces in a radiant glow.
“ S ehr gut,” murmured Brother Lazarus, taking his place beside them.
“A very good sign,” agreed Mina. “The ley is here and it is highly active.”
The electromagnetic force of the ley continued to build, intensifying to an extent they had never witnessed before. The indigo lights pulsed with an ever-increasing strength, and the ring of yellow lights on Wilhelmina’s ley lamp flashed and blinked with random bursts, as if tracing the violent surges of power swirling around them.
“Ow!” cried Mina, dropping her lamp and clutching her hand.
“What happened?” said Kit. “Wha-Yikes!” He dropped his device too. The heat had suddenly spiked to an unbearable level.
Mina held out her hand. The palm was red where the flesh was burned. “That’s never happened before.”
Even as she spoke, there was a faint sizzling sound. Threads of white smoke emanated from the little holes in the brass carapace of Mina’s ley lamp, followed by a soft pop like that of a cork withdrawn from a bottle. Instantly the lamp went dark.
A second later Kit’s lamp fizzled out too, and the air carried the distinct whiff of ozone.
“I guess that’s that,” said Kit.
Brother Lazarus took Mina’s hand and examined the burn.
“We know the ley is here-no doubt about that,” said Kit, taking in the yew’s massive trunk, hard as iron and big as a house growing right in the middle of the ley. “Now all we have to do is figure out what to do about this whacking great tree.”
On the Road Again
Human beings are made to travel, it seems. And a lot happens on roads. Most ancient cultures revered the road as a sacred place-the Celts, for example, considered the junction where two roads crossed a holy place. Certainly, the road is a metaphor for change and transformation-originating, perhaps, in tales such as Homer’s Odyssey and expressed in modern terms in books like On the Road by Jack Kerouac.
In Hollywood “the road” is enshrined in a genre all its own: the road movie. From the larky string of Bob Hope and Bing Crosby productions such as The Road to Rio all the way to Thelma and Louise and extending even to absurdities like Dumb amp; Dumber, the road movie is both a symbol and a celebration of the innate spiritual desire to change, to be transformed. As physicist Werner Heisenberg, a man who knew something about the elusive nature of reality and its effects on the human spirit, put it, “The human race seems to love nothing more than a long detour.”
The road and its inherent detours, dangers, and disasters can be a forceful agent of change. Approaching the outskirts of Damascus in the Arab Spring of 2011, I could easily recall the journey of the man who would become known to history as Saint Paul. In the early first century, however, he was still known as Saul, and he was on his way from Jerusalem with a heart full of hate when he was struck down by a flash of light so powerful it could not be ignored; Saul fell to the ground, and God spoke. Ironically, the purpose of his journey was to destroy the men and women who claimed to belong to “The Way”- the name given then to those we now call Christians.
Once in Damascus, Saul was led down what the gospel of Luke terms “the Street called Straight” where, blinded, humbled, and desperate to make sense of what had happened to him, the newest convert to The Way was eventually taken to the house of a man named Ananias. While strolling down that famous Straight Street myself, it became clear to me that my early familiarity with the biblical story of Paul’s dramatic journey on the road must have contributed to, if not inspired, my use of ley lines as portals between realms of existence-an impression enhanced, I expect, by my surroundings: Damascus is one of the world’s timeless cities, a place where the remnants of successive empires have each left their indelible marks-a place where a traveller could easily believe he or she was two thousand years in the past.
The tale unfolding in the five books of the Bright Empires series has been growing in my mind for over fifteen years. In common with the characters in the tale, and by way of research to enable a more accurate atmosphere in the telling, I have walked down canyoned alleyways in London, strode between parallel ranks of sphinxes in Egypt, descended into the sunken, sacred tufa roads of Tuscany-the current name for old Etruria-and followed the straight path through the Dordogne, Syria, Arizona, Eastern Europe, and most recently, Lebanon. Placing my feet exactly where countless others have placed theirs, often over many millennia, I can easily imagine emerging at the other end of the passage a different person, in a different time.
This is, of course, the imperative and the appeal of pilgrimage: to change over the course of a journey. As the landscape approaches and then disappears, the traveller confronts his hopes and fears, his questions and doubts… and then leaves them behind as he walks, it is hoped, into a place of enlightenment and welcome.
Walking on the Camino de Santiago in Spain, the venerable pilgrim route that begins almost anywhere in Europe before finally merging on the French side of the Pyrenees to cross over into Northern Spain, I saw and experienced firsthand the power of the pilgrim path. At the beginning of the journey, many of my fellow pilgrims carried huge rucksacks stacked high and bulging with the necessities of travel, with foam cushions and sleeping bags, teddy bears, tin cups, and extra clothing, flags, and all sorts of bric-a-brac dangling from their massive backpacks.
As the trail wound through mountains and hills, across arid plains and stretches of wilderness to Santiago de Compostela, and as the days bled into weeks, those same overstuffed packs tended to lose their bulk. Near the top of one particularly challenging mountain a day or two from journey’s end, I came upon a veritable cairn of T-shirts and waterproofs, paperback books, socks, trousers, bedrolls, and-yes-those teddy bears and tin cups. Labouring up the mountain with my fellow pilgrims, one weary foot in front of another, it was clear that the sense of adventure with which we had all started out had now turned into something else altogether. We were all on the road, el
