Ray knelt by the huge boulder and felt the dew drops dampen his knees through his green robe. The sun was rising over the hills toward the mainland, but over the sea to the west, it was still dark. He had walked the beach before dawn, picking up violet pebbles and rolling them between his fingers as he thought. It was a place he could be alone with his thoughts and full of clarity. Even walking with just one companion made his thoughts hazy, the feelings and thoughts of the person he was with always intruding too loudly, like noisy neighbors, into his own consciousness. He even needed space from Jord once in a while, though he had taught his intuition to quiet more around his best friend and lifelong companion.
So much intuition was a blessing and a curse, his mother always said. When Ray was young and read his parents’ thoughts, they had called him a seer and sent him away to this island of the Druids. Then came the realization that he had seen colors or auras around certain people from the time he was a baby. He honestly had grown to think that was how everyone saw other people, but the Druids helped him clarify his gifts. Before coming here, he had wondered how long he would be alone in this world, and the thought of that scared young boy made him think of Aric and how he had seen himself in the boy who washed up on shore that day. Ray had been of a similar age when he had come to inhabit this island.
Naturally, the Druid elders wanted Ray to perform his talents as soon as he arrived. From a tender age, he was asked to do everything from predicting crop failures to approving marriages, baby names, and war tactics. The responsibility left him feeling burdened and confused on his good days, utterly overwhelmed and lost at other times. Such was the solitary life of being head Druid now too. And then he smiled, thinking about Jord, his best friend since arriving on the island nearly a lifetime ago. And half of the time he had spent on the island, he had also had Aric as his family.
“I guess it’s not so lonely,” Ray said out loud, his breath vapor mingling with the morning fog. “We lost souls find one another here.” He found a gentle slope that his short legs could climb, and he began the long ascent up the coastal cliffs to the standing stones. His hair was fading into gray on top, but the stringy brown strands reached his shoulders and whipped him in the face as the seaward winds picked up. He pulled his hood up, which he normally avoided since everyone said he looked like a frog when he was covered from head to toe in all green.
Ray’s morning walks were for the dual purpose of clearing his head and setting his intentions for the day’s prayer. He did this in the ancient way that had been practiced for hundreds of years, finding that the feel of the flint tool in his hand connected him to the ancestral spirit in the stone. He knelt now by the guardian stone of the great stone circle, which was perched on a hill that overlooked the pebbled beach below. It wasn’t within the circle; it was outside of it. It wasn’t the largest, and it wasn’t even sandstone, which was the softest for carving, but it was his stone. It called his name. He knew what it felt like to be the stout guardian of taller, more graceful stones in the circle.
He set to his carving, which pulled the secrets from the stone. The walk on the beach prior had helped to quiet him for the ritual carving, so now with his soul at peace, he closed his eyes, reaching for the stone and willing the spirits to guide him through the life spiral that he would carve. The labyrinth spiral that was traditionally carved and created was a therapeutic process but also a calming sight in and of itself for any passersby or for the hundreds of people who would be gathered at the stone circle for the summer solstice that night. Ray imagined his busy mind, his negative and hurtful thoughts, his fears and overwhelm following the spiral pathway out of the chaotic center of his mind to the freedom outside of the whirling maelstrom.
Just as his responsibility as head Druid bore chains that dragged and tied him down like the spinning center, so too the power gave him a wild freedom. Laying hands on people to heal them, feeling the pulsing of their life and aura under his fingertips, was empowering and humbling all at once. Remembering the balance of the spiral kept Ray centered in it all. And so just as he would follow the spiral out to freedom, he could follow it back inside to the safety and huddle of his mind’s deepest crevices, where he could focus in a deeper way. Out he went and back inward, tracing and retracing his new spiral. The blue-green veins in the stone held a secret that he had been trying to get at for years.
Sometimes, if he looked up and found himself, after a long walk, at his rock without a tool, he could just follow one of the spirals that had already been carved with a fingertip. He had done this many times before and had occasionally channeled the carver of the original spiral. That person’s thoughts flooded his mind with such suddenness that sometimes he couldn’t help but laugh, taken aback by the juxtapositions that they had unleashed from his mind—or manifested into it.
It was during one such occasion, on the summer solstice many years ago, that Ray had been on the northern coast of the island, rockier and colder and much less pleasant for walks.
Something had called him out there to the wild northern mountains, though, and so he had found a suitable stone, too difficult to carve into with the sharpened stone he had with him, and settled into a happy crevice that was covered in seven spirals and begun tracing and trancing, taming his mind to be singular and quiet, focused on his morning’s work. The waves crashed madly on the shore beneath him, and the wind howled, a portent for bad weather in the northern isles, perhaps. The sound of storms off the coast quickly became as steady as a pulse. It was white noise for Ray’s morning meditation, which he settled into deeply and peacefully.
His mind’s eye became blue and spiraled like the labyrinth before him, but what he thought he began to see at the center of it jolted him out of his trance. He found the sound of his own heartbeat too loud for his own ears—or was that the angry sea below? Afraid that he had lost touch with information he needed, he fought his way back to the spiral pathway meditation his mind had started on. Again, he saw what he feared he had seen before. There were bodies, flung from the jagged western cliffs into the crashing waves below, sucked into the center of the spiral.
Disturbed by this vision but drawn to understanding it, Ray walked to the cliff’s edge. Toes hanging over, he outstretched his arms, closed his eyes, and breathed in deeply, trusting completely that a stiff wind wouldn’t blow him off. Might such courage reveal the riddle of this vision and help him to understand? That was when he saw the boat.
It was in the Norse style, long, sturdy, and curved at bow and stern, with room for several men to stand fore or aft and dozens of seats for rowers. At first he was shocked because he had sensed that the meeting between his people and those to the north with such ship technology would occur in generations to come, not during his lifetime. He wondered at this surprising visitation, and as fast as it had appeared, it was gone. Opening his eyes wider, he saw only horizon, no ship.
As Ray squinted, looking for the ship in the distance, he realized that his sight was an omen. He felt the shifts in the earth beneath him and knew something magical was happening indeed. Ray began walking west down the beach, following the sounds of the storms out at sea, being pulled by the magnetic shifts happening deep in the earth’s core. There was an outcrop of rocks that were on the western coast of the island that had just come into view, and he was slowly making his way around to them, picking up pace as the crashing waves became more violent. This outcrop housed a deep cave that could provide shelter and safety. This cave was also covered in carvings from the previous inhabitants of the island—the ones who came when the ice receded. Ray had been brought to the cave repeatedly by the previous head Druid, Murlen, for meditation, teaching on the ancient carvings, and moss samples, so he knew a safe way to approach without being seen and felt confident in his hideout.
Just as he reached the cave, he heard the weakest whimper. It sounded like a lamb abandoned by its mother, the barest, bleakest bleating for help.
The boy had appeared to catch himself on a large rock, creating ripples all around him. Ray untwisted the rope that secured his garments and waved to the boy, wading out to within feet of him but throwing his belt out to prevent getting caught in the same riptide. The boy was larger than him but young and weakened from thirst and exertion. His face was ghastly pale, which alarmed Ray enough to situate the boy on a dry, stable rock before moving him to the cave. Ray drew his leather flask from the pocket inside the breast of his shirt and offered it to the boy.
“Are you hurt?” Ray asked, slowly, touching the boy’s head and then chest to mime the words as best he could.
Then the boy responded with a clear Norse accent, “Mother?”
“I have to get you to the cave to get you dry and warm quickly.” Ray did his best to drape the boy’s arms over his shoulders. He used the boy’s weight to propel him forward, out of the shallows of the angry water and toward the shelter of the cave.
“Where is my father?” the boy asked, eyes rolling back in his head.
Ray was strong for his small stature, but the boy was immense, and his dead weight pulled Ray to the ground in front of the cave. He needed help breathing, so Ray began to massage his heart behind his breastbone and shared his own breath with the boy’s by blowing into his mouth. After several minutes, the boy coughed up the sea and looked at Ray with impossibly red and sad eyes.
“You are alive again. Thank the gods.” Ray’s voice sounded surprised and foreign, even to him.
“I need to talk to you.” A familiar voice broke Ray from his trance. In fact, it was the same voice that seemed to always be interrupting him as of late.
Ailsa
“Hail and welcome, Ailsa.” Ray bowed to me in his exaggerated way as I approached the stones.
“I need to talk to you,” I said simply, without malice.
Ray gestured with his right hand to the kerbstone on the north side of the stone circle. We sat, overlooking the sea below. “You’re up early on your birthday,” he remarked.
“I’ve been walking all night,” I quipped. “It’s nice to sit down.”
“What is it, child?” he asked, concerned.
I fumbled with the strings that hung from my cloak. “Why didn’t you tell me your plan?” I asked like a hurt child.
Ray placed his hand on mine, still unsure. “It wasn’t my plan, Ailsa. I had no power over it. He was sent to us on the day you were born! It was the gods.”
“Then why be deceitful with Ros? If it was in the hands of the gods, then why did you need to meddle with our feelings?”
He sighed. “I guess I tried to steer Ros away to protect you.”
“Protect me?” I questioned. “I lost my father, and then you made me think the person I loved the most didn’t want me! Because you scared him.”
“We didn’t scare him, Ailsa. He scared himself.”
“That doesn’t even make sense,” I protested, exhausted.
“He’s a scared person, Ailsa. He’s not for you. He has much to learn still about self-control and courage.”
I wanted to yell; I wanted to scream like a child and stomp off. But my anger was seething and quiet and righteous, so I simply looked at him and said with restrained passion, “That’s not for you to decide, Ray.” He started to say something to defend himself and the role of the Druids, but I felt Jord’s tall, calming presence behind us, and the rest of the Druids appeared out of the mist on the cliff top, ready to lead the village in calling the sun up on the solstice. He had been wrong, and he knew it. Whether it was his affection for Aric, his concern for me as an orphan, or a general disdain of Ros, he had let his personal feelings affect his role as head Druid. That’s not something I’ll ever let myself do, I thought.
We stood and met the rest of the Druids in the circle. Jord struck his flint against the kerbstone and lit the first torch that would become a great fire. One by one, we passed the fire between us, lighting all twelve torches. Jord was to Ray’s right; I was to his left. He started to say the words to open the ceremony we had as Druids before the rest of the village arrived, but he paused, looking over at me with tears in his eyes. Jord looked over at us, out of the corners of his yellow cat eyes.
“I’m sorry, Ailsa,” Ray said. Jord smiled at Ray sympathetically and looked over at me.
“It’s too late. The village is here,” I said.
And Ray quickly led the chant as the first group of celebrants crested the hill in the dark of predawn.
Edie
“How do I look?” Frank asked, sliding on aviators and gesturing to his vibrant tie-dye T-shirt and Birkenstocks.
“You look…appropriate,” I responded, taking time to search for the right word.
“I look sweet, sure, but look at you!” He paused amid our hike from the car park toward the most famous of all Scottish standing stones on the Outer Hebrides. “I can’t believe you went all out with the Druid’s cloak and intricately braided hair.” He picked up a braid that had a bronze ring interwoven into its plaits. “It’s very…appropriate,” he finished, winking at me.
“Someone has to remind the New Age folks that this goes back a bit further than their philosophical debates.” I checked the weather on my phone for the fourteenth time that day and trudged on. “The way they bicker about opinions on everything makes it seem as if they have some substantial evidence of the truth, which, archaeologically speaking, is very unlikely,” I added.
Frank laughed at me. “Are you going to drop the knowledge on them that Stonehenge is likely a winter solstice festival spot and not a summer one?” he asked as he gestured up at the summer sun and around at the bright green summer hills around the Isle of Lewis.
“Let’s just try to make friends this time, shall we?” I suggested.
Frank laughed even more heartily than he normally did at my dry humor as we approached the horde of celebrants pitching tents, dancing, mingling, and starting drum circles. It was the day before the summer solstice, and that night would be an epic celebration into the wee morning, followed by the once-in-a-lifetime experience of watching the sun rise above the heel stone and spread its rays over Callanish, my favorite stone henge.
My heart rate crept up, as much from excitement as from my slight agoraphobia. I spared a thought for Sully and how much fun he would have had here. He had this beautiful way of incorporating the human storytelling culture and folklore that surrounded archaeology into the actual science and study. My other professors had balked at modern interpretations of archaeological landscapes and made fun of popular shows that “bastardized” the science by commercializing the art and monuments and the people (or aliens) who had made them. But Sully had this great appreciation for all people and the way their interactions with the monuments and history were actually a part of it, being woven into the complete story even now.
“These monuments are still alive in the culture, and the story of human interaction with them is still being told,” he used to say. “Of course we want to get at who constructed them and why, but we don’t get closer to that answer by dismissing what the stones have come to mean over the last several thousand years and how they have remained relevant in the culture this long.” I was pulled out of this benevolent, idyllic thought cloud by an actual cloud of thick smoke being blown in my face.
“Oh, this stuff is excellent.” Frank crinkled his nose at the enormous, bearded man who stood in front of me, complete with peace pipe and free samples of his “expertly engineered ganja,” as was printed on the bags.
I waved my hand in front of my face, batting away the sentimental thoughts of Sully as much as the pungent smoke. There was no room for sentimentality if I was going to conduct research, and I had better remind myself of that if this was going to be the success I wanted it to be for the specific chapter I was working on in Sully’s book. Why was Callanish built later than the other henges I was studying? Why would the circles be so concentrated in a radius of a few hundred miles in the north with one giant one, Stonehenge, so far south?
I checked that the voice recorder on my phone was working, made sure I had my compass and GPS to mark the stone locations perfectly in my journal, and went off through the crowd in Frank’s wake, following his trail of fleeting friendships, hoping it led to something worthwhile at the end.
“So you’re sayin’ there’s a whole stoon just missin’ from the henge?” The kilted Scottish brogue across the campfire from me was intriguing, or should I say, had been intriguing, before its owner had plied himself liberally with Glenfiddich in “honorrrr” of the solstice. The rolled r’s were undoubtedly the best part.
“I don’t see how that would make it any different” came one of the more opinionated male voices to my right.
“Well, you’re right. It wouldn’t really have made a difference for tonight, the summer solstice, but that’s irrelevant. You see, the largest stone was paired with that one there.”
I pointed over the tops of their heads to the one remaining trilithon, a stone structure consisting of two posts and a lintel. The sky was brilliantly colored, just past sunset, and the gloaming left purple shadows on the stones and everyone’s faces. The North Star and Vega, a star in the Lyra constellation, twinkled in the sky already, and the new fires coming alight all around us added to the magic of the atmosphere.
“There was another trilithon there, next to the other tall stones, and if you were here on the winter solstice, then you would see that the rising sun would have come just in between the stones, perfectly. And if the night before was clear, Orion would have twinkled overhead. You have to imagine the whole structure in its entirety in order to contemplate when and what it was used for. On the morning of the winter solstice, the light would have come directly between the largest pillars and illuminated the altar stone, resting on its side, likely holding some sort of sacrifice or the remains of some of the great people of the village who had died that year.”
“So you’re saying that the winter solstice was more significant than the summer solstice at the time?” came the Scottish brogue again.
“Not necessarily,” I said. “But I am saying that Stonehenge, the most famous and widely known stone circle, was used for the winter solstice in particular, but it was also likely part of a larger temple complex, meaning there were other structures used for different festivals and times of year. We know that because they’re all over the British Isles but have different orientations and were built at different times.”
“Aye, there’s Avebury right down the road from Stonehenge; that’s even older,” piped up a voice from across the hazy circle.
I wafted the smoke away from my face and smiled at the deep voice across from me. “Yes, Avebury is one of the oldest complexes and offers some good examples of how the people of the time would have lived and interacted among the stones. Stenness in Orkney gives us a similar sense of habitation among the stones, as well as an extensive temple complex. It’s really not the stones themselves that create the intrigue. At least for me, it’s the people who dwelt among them and the mystery of how they lived and who they were since they didn’t leave behind any writing other than a few stone picture carvings, some of which we assume to be contemporary with the structures. Others, of course, like the runic symbols carved on these Callanish stones of Lewis, show us the millennia of interaction that have occurred within the stones since the original builders, and that arguably adds to the truth of their whole story as well.”
Frank lounged across the fire from me, laughing at my impromptu lecture and the interested, if slightly stoned, class around me. We danced as the sun went down, joined drum circles, shared trail mix and beer with strangers, and made friends around the largest bonfire at the end of the evening, where they had expertly had pizza delivered from the only restaurant nearby.
After my lecture devolved into the typical discussions of wizards, aliens, and archaeological scandals, I went over to share my cloak with a chilly Frank and show him my journal. “You command a lot of attention in that thing, you know.” He complimented my Druid’s cloak and picked up a long, auburn braid that dangled in my face.
“I have good news on the research front,” I said, jumping to the point with excitement. I really didn’t mind that Frank was a little high as I was telling him. It would make his reaction more animated, I thought. I opened up my journal to the center, where my diagram covered both pages; leaves of tracing paper were attached. I showed him the original circle I’d drawn, the Stones of Stenness, followed by Orkney, Stonehenge, and now Callanish, which fit into the circle perfectly when they were aligned with the cardinal directions.
“Wow,” he said, moving the tracing papers up and down, watching the stones fall into place.
“I know. This last chapter in Sully’s book is going to be groundbreaking. I think I have proof that the separate stone circles weren’t for separate cultures; they were for one culture of people who moved around, perhaps as a holdover from their hunter-gatherer culture, or perhaps they traveled for big festivals, like we are. This would also explain why they moved stones so far, so that they could share or repurpose special menhirs.”
“It’s all happening!” Frank said, clapping his hands loud enough that our temporary friends looked over at us, and I laughed.
The night was perfect. We pitched our tent alongside some new friends and crawled in under my giant sleeping bag for a few hours of rest before the dawn. Some people stayed awake all night, but their distant chatter and laughter was a balm to our tired spirits.
“This reminds me of being a child and drifting off to sleep on the sofa while my parents had friends or family over, chatting and telling stories. It’s comforting.”
“Ahh, she speaks of her family,” Frank said gently.
“There are some memories,” I said, “that are so hazy and so far back, they’re not tainted by anything. So I guess that’s a blessing.” We lay in silence for a few moments.
“Edie?” Frank began, checking to see if I was still awake. I was, and I rolled over to look at him. “I will go to Newgrange with you in six months, if you want, but I think it’s time for you to make a new friend. I want to be there for you, I do. But since Sully died, you’ve retreated again, and I’m all you have. It’s not enough, Edie. I’d be selfish not to tell you so. It seems that Michael really does care about you and share your interests, so why not strike up a friendship at least, even if it’s not more?”
I sighed deeply into the orange nylon abyss above my head. I sort of wished we were lying out under the stars, but I knew I’d probably be happy not to be covered in a heavy dew in the morning. “OK, you’re right. I’ll ask him at Lughnasadh in six weeks.”
“Good.” Frank brushed my forehead in a benedictive motion. “You’ll have fun.” He smiled.
“Just as friends,” I said.
“OK, so not that much fun,” Frank joked. And we giggled until we fell asleep.