“I thought I had lost you, Luke.”
“I could not sleep in there.”
I would not speak of the rats, and my fear, to him. He said:
“Tonight you will sleep in a bed.”
I nodded. “I will be glad of it, sire.”
But I was not glad when, at the end of the afternoon, he pointed and I saw the Stones of the Sanctuary ahead of us. They stood like jagged teeth on the skyline; tiny but, being miles away still, having the promise of enormity. The promise or the threat. I had made this journey as a duty to my father’s memory, not thinking of its end. There had been vague thoughts of the High Seers, of Seances, but nothing concrete, nothing, really, that meant anything. Those distant pillars were real, and foreboding. They were surrounded by empty downland, cropped only by rabbits. No man would go near, no shepherd graze his flocks in their shadow. It was the place of the High Seers, dread and holy, and that dread touched me, making me want to turn back toward the world of men. I would rather have taken my chance with Peter and his Captains than go forward. But I had come so far that I must go on to the end. And again I would not show my fear to Ezzard.
It was a long walk toward them. The sun, sinking, had come out from behind clouds and cast shadows from the Stones that stretched tenuous fingers in our direction. I could see them more clearly. They roughly formed a circle, great jagged-hewn wedges many times the height of a man and broad in proportion. They were set apart from each other but some were linked by other immense stones resting on top and between them.
Inside there was nothing but the rabbit-cropped grass. I felt a new and different alarm. Could this emptiness be the Sanctuary? I had expected a huge building, a castle perhaps. Where did the High Seers live? There was only grass and the great time-weathered stones. Did one walk through a doorway in one, into the Spirits’ world? Or climb an invisible ladder to a stronghold in the clouds?
We crossed a shallow ditch and the stones loomed over us. We passed between two of them, scored by the wind and rain not of years, it seemed, but centuries. Within the outer ring were other stones, some standing and some fallen. Near the center, beside one of these, was a sort of mushroom, made of stone but whiter and less pitted than the bigger ones. It was only a few feet high. Ezzard went to it and put his hand underneath, feeling for something. I stood beside him, telling my limbs not to tremble. We waited in silence, for half a minute perhaps. And then the stone mushroom spoke:
“Who comes?”
The Seer bent his head toward the mushroom.
“Ezzard, with the Prince in Waiting.”
I do not know what I expected to happen: thunder and lighting, perhaps, a chariot of fire appearing out of the sky, a solid rainbow leading to a magic land. Instead there was a creaking sound and the ground on the other side of the mushroom moved, splitting and opening. There was not darkness revealed but light, a whiter, brighter light than I had ever seen, the steps leading down.
Ezzard said: “Come, Luke.”
I hesitated. They were ordinary steps but they terrified me. And the light . . . the light of the Spirits? I remembered all the events they had set in motion. Maybe they had helped me to win the jeweled sword and my father to the Princedom. But after that . . . my mother slain, my aunt executed for her murder, my father’s head set up above the East Gate, a thing to be mocked. And I myself driven from the city disguised as a polymuf. The good they had done me was surely outweighed by the evil.
All this was true. What was also true was that at last I faced their stronghold. They could do no more than take my life. It was little enough worth living as it was; if I broke and ran it was worth nothing. I went in front of Ezzard into the hole.
A dozen steps below there was a platform where the staircase turned on itself before descending even farther into the bowels of the earth. Behind me Ezzard stopped and I stopped also. He touched a button set in the wall. There was a whirring sound, followed by the creaking I had heard on the surface, and I saw the gap closing above us, blotting out the sky. I realized then that underneath grass and earth there was metal and this was rising, a trapdoor to seal the opening at the top of the stairs. I was less alarmed than confused, my mind trying to take in what could not be denied and yet was impossible. The light, I saw, came from long tubes of glass. Ezzard touched another button and more of them flashed into radiance, lighting the stairs below.
“Ezzard!” I cried. “These lights . . .”
He looked at me. I could scarcely bring myself to say it, but it was not possible to be silent.
“They are not the lights of the Spirits . . . and the trap door, that is not the work of Spirits either. These are machines!”
“Yes,” he said. “I told you there would be strange things to learn.”
• • •
I sat at supper with Ezzard and the High Seers. They wore no cloaks but simple clothes—trousers and shirt—as Ezzard did also; and except for Ezzard their heads were not cropped but carried a normal covering of hair. On the senior of the three, who had come to Winchester, it was sparse and white with age but the big one had a heavy thatch of black. And he did not, I noticed, eat with the sparrowlike delicacy he had shown at my father’s banquet but heartily, as a man who enjoys his food. Like the shaved heads and the cloaks, that had been done for show.
It was strange, too, to hear them speak in easy, unmeasured voices—to speak and even laugh. They were ordinary men, and relief and disappointment were at war in me, realizing this. I was silent, putting no questions and answering briefly the questions put to me. There were not many of these: I guessed they were letting me get used to things by degrees, accustom my mind gradually to its shock. I learned their names: the little white-haired man was called Lanark, the big dark one Murphy.
When supper was over each took his own plate to the kitchen where they were stacked in a machine that washed them: one could hear the rush of water behind the closed door. There seemed to be no servants—I supposed because there were no polymufs. One of the men operated another machine that moved across the floor with a whining sound, sucking crumbs and dust into itself. The others led the way into a large room with many chairs and couches. The walls had been painted with scenes of landscape framed by pillars—a forest glade, a garden, a view of rocks and sea, and on the fourth the streets of a city, with men and women, children, a dog scratching itself in the dust. They were reminders to men who lived like moles underground of what the world was like.
We took seats. Lanark said:
“Now, Luke, what would you like to know?”
There were so many things that it was hard to think of one. I said after a moment:
“The machines—what makes them go?”
“Electricity.”
“What is that?”
“A force. It is hard to explain. Something which is invisible but which can be used.”
“Invisible? Like the Spirits?”
He smiled. “No.”
I said, with daring: “Do the Spirits exist?”
I still half expected to be condemned for blasphemy. But Lanark said:
“If they do they have not shown themselves to us.”