The old coon dog dozed.
“I am. And I don’t know how much longer I have. So let me cut off the gristle and get to the meat. There’s nothing wrong with your discovery of your manhood, even if you are still a child. The first experience of the flesh is a great challenge for everyone, but it is a special trial for males and you have passed yours. That may bode well. You are destined to run well before yourself in many ways. Now, before I tell you the things you were brought here to hear I will let you ask me one question. What would you like to know about-the lights?”
Lloyd pondered for a moment, feeling for the woman’s intent.
“I think you’ll tell me about the lights,” he replied at last. “What I’d like to know is how you get this boat through such a narrow passage.”
The woman gave the cat a long, deep stroke.
“The boat never leaves this grotto. Nor do I. It wouldn’t be safe for me to move about anymore.”
She clutched the hairless animal tighter and lowered her voice.
“And I don’t mean to frighten you, Lloyd, but there may come a time, sooner than you think, when it won’t be safe for you to move about so freely, either.”
Lloyd shifted in his chair, unable to turn his gaze from the woman’s eyes, which reached out and embraced him, her words filling the sparsely furnished room like the shadows that closed in around the lamp.
CHAPTER 9. The Hunger for Secrets
“DID I SCARE YOU, LLOYD?” MOTHER TONGUE ASKED AFTER A moment of silence. “Or is your hunger for secrets so great that you are immune to fear?”
Lloyd tried to feel in his mind, reaching inside and then outward into the shadows for some sense of his dead sister’s protective presence. Why was there a museum under a graveyard and a riverboat stuck inside a cliff? How did the darkness suddenly burst into light? A wave of fatigue washed over him and he longed to snuggle with the dog on the rough couch.
“We’ll see,” he answered at last, not wanting to show that he was scared-and scared because he did not know why. “Who are the Spirosians?”
Mother Tongue gave another one of her odd smiles.
“The movement dates back to very olden times in Europe and the Middle East, but it draws its strength from even longer ago, in ancient Greece and Egypt. It is based on the thought of one exemplary man, Spiro of Lemnos. Some stories tell that he was a hermaphrodite-both a male and a female. But that may be just a legend. We do know that he was a Phoenician by birth-sometimes called a son of Atlantis, the original philosopher-scientist. But he was also a practitioner of what some might describe as magic. A man of unique genius. The superior of Thales, Pythagoras, and Archimedes, and greater than all those who followed-Leonardo, Copernicus, Galileo, Newton. He saw more deeply into the mysteries of life than anyone else before or since. In fact, his ideas were so far ahead of his time that he was constantly in danger of persecution, imprisonment, and death. So he concealed his discoveries and teachings in a secret language-hierograms embedded in beautiful, intricate puzzles that he called Enigmas. No one knows how he came by this language or the design for these puzzles, but there is a myth that this knowledge was given to him by the gods. Others believe he stole it.”
“What sort of things did he know?” Lloyd inquired.
“The intimate dependencies of energy and matter-hidden correspondences. The lights you witnessed? They are his conception. A form of electrical power harnessed two thousand years before Benjamin Franklin experimented with his kite and key.”
“Two thousand years ago!” Lloyd coughed.
“The world is not always what you think it is, and history is most certainly not what you have been told,” Mother Tongue replied.
“What else did he do?” Lloyd asked, thinking back to St. Ives’s story of Junius Rutherford.
“He grasped the most complex relationships between numbers, music, and the stars. He looked deep into the idiosyncrasies of other creatures, the chemistry of healing, and the nature of disease. Most important, his thought embraced the relationship of language to life and the shape of the mind. He was a geometer, dreamer, and diviner-a maker of medicines and occult machines. One legend says he could even raise and animate the dead.”
“That sounds like an awful lot for one man to know,” Lloyd said, whistling.
“Yes!” agreed Mother Tongue. “That was his most insightful idea of all. The necessity of camouflage to survive. The need to appear to be many men instead of one, and the need to
“How do you know that he was just one man?”
Mother Tongue stroked the cat. The coon dog never moved.
“The same has been asked of many,” she answered. “There is a view that all the great figures of inspiration- Socrates, Moses, Jesus, Muhammad, Buddha, Zoroaster-do not represent individual historical figures but, rather, are code names for composite characters uniting the thoughts and visions of many people. There is no way to prove or disprove the actual life of Spiro now, for he chose always to hide in the shadows, and so his reputation and his achievements have been relegated to the shadows of history. But upon this skeleton of shadows most of what we know of as the modern world has developed.
“He traveled widely-to Rome and the deserts of Arabia. Jerusalem, Baghdad, Alexandria, and deep into Europe-India and China, too. His knowledge he passed on to carefully chosen pupils who were sworn to secrecy. Magicians, physicians, alchemists, philosophers, architects, engineers, and artists. To each of them he gave a piece of the master puzzle, one fragment of what he called the Great Enigma.”
“Why?”
“So no one individual or even generation ended up knowing the master goal-they only knew the pieces they had been entrusted with and the implications that flowed from them. This protected the Great Enigma, for if one person or school failed, for whatever reason, to pass on or build on their knowledge, there was always the hope that others would survive and continue the work.”
“What happened to him?” Lloyd asked, leaning forward. “When did he die?”
“In one sense, he never did,” Mother Tongue replied. “Because we are talking about him now and still coming to terms with his thought and deeds. But in the sense you mean, what happened to the one man is lost in the puzzle that he created. What happened to the many men and women that he became-that is much better known. Because, you see, it was inevitable that the pieces of the puzzle would seek each other out and try to form the Whole.”
“How do you mean?” Lloyd asked, and was surprised when the ancient woman gestured toward the wall of the cabin behind her. He could have sworn that the wall was bare before, but now it showed a map of the world that seemed to glow and swirl like the marvelous lights that had illuminated the crusted boat upon his arrival.
Mother Tongue cleared her throat, as if savoring the taste of her phlegm.
“From the sands of Egypt to what is now Italy and France, Holland, Germany, and the forests of Northern Europe, England and Ireland, all the way to the Orient, the lineage of the students of Spiro’s teachings coalesced to form a confederacy with the grand design of unifying magic, religion, and science to lead mankind to the fulfillment of the destiny he foresaw. Many of the greatest minds and prime movers of Western culture were later Spiro’s followers, bound to secrecy by the oath of the Order. Paracelsus, Nicholas of Cusa, Raleigh, Bacon, Van Leeuwenhoek, Pascal, Lavoisier-and countless others who remain unknown. The names and contributions are so entangled in history that it is impossible to separate the individuals and the strands. Cosmographers and mapmakers joined the Order. Noblemen and divines. Caliphs and rajas. The Spirosians infiltrated the Catholic Church, the Jewish merchant-finance networks, and the cabalistic enclaves-even the dynasties of distant China. They directed emperors and later formed the major craft guilds. They sponsored secret expeditions of discovery.
“Through oblique channels, it was Spiro’s thought that lit the fire that fueled the Renaissance and allowed the birth of science, and later inspired the Spirosians to take key steps that led to both the French and American revolutions. From the Great Pyramids to Trafalgar Square, Mecca to Monticello, his influence has been felt. But
