"There had been a small herd of cattle grazing in the valley that night —
the riches of the village. The whole herd was dead, and the villagers left with nothing. Some of the cattle had been torn to pieces and the pieces scattered far apart. Some had completely disappeared. Vanished without trace. Others had been roasted alive. The entire valley had been drowned in mud, feet deep in places. Athyr said the mud reached the tops of the surrounding hills. " He pointed to a cliff face to the west. "The entire side of that hill over there was blasted to rubble. You can still see the rocks at the foot of the cliff, although they're almost overgrown now. " I looked and, sure enough, the bottom of the cliff over by the distant lakeside which I had taken, from this distance, to be sloping hillside, was in fact a tumbled confusion of ruin overgrown by rank, tufted weeds and scraggly shrubs.
"Everything was covered in mud, and yet Athyr said the cattle were roasted alive. I still don't understand how that could have happened, how it could have been true. " He shrugged his shoulders. "I can do no more than accept it on faith. Athyr would never lie about anything. I have never known a more truthful man. He told me that is what he saw, therefore that is what he saw. He believed what he told me, and I believed him. By the time he brought me here, more than ten years had gone by and the grass had begun to cover everything again, although not so thickly as it has now. "
I interrupted him. "What about the lake?" He looked at me in surprise.
"What about it?" "I don't know what about it. That's why I'm asking. Did Athyr say anything about the lake?"
He frowned, remembering that day. "No. No, Athyr said nothing about the lake. Why do you ask?"
"I don't know. " I was examining the valley more closely now. "That whole valley is shut in. How did the cattle get there?" He looked mystified. "I don't know. They must have crossed the hills. " I kept my voice free of impatience. "Why would they do that? There's no shortage of grazing on the other side of the hills. Why would the villagers go to all the trouble of bringing their cattle all the way up and over the hills to let them graze in a shut-in valley?"
"For protection, perhaps?"
"From whom? Did you have trouble with raiders back then?"
"Not that I know of. "
"And you're sure he said nothing about the lake?"
"Nothing. I am convinced of that. "
"Has the lake always been here?"
"What kind of a question is that? Of course it has. "
"Then where did all the mud come from?"
"I don't know, boyo. "
"What else did he tell you? Think hard, Meric. It's important. Was there anything else he said to you about this place that might have slipped from your memory? Something that you might not have thought important at the time? Anything at all?"
His face became thoughtful as he turned back to the valley below us. I watched him closely, not taking my eyes off his face for a second. His gaze swept across the valley from right to left, and then I saw it — a momentary tic between his brows. I held my breath as it became obvious that he was searching his memories of his first visit to this place and recalling something, something vague that had lain disregarded and forgotten, for years.
"There was something. Something he said about that hillside. " Then it was as though a light suddenly shone in his eyes. "I remember now. He said the Sum God's face was there in the mud of the hillside. " "What?
What in Hades does that mean?" He grinned a quick grin and looked at me. "I wondered the same thing and asked him to explain. He said that the mud on the hillside over there had a circular gap in it, where there was no mud at all. He said it was as if one of those dragons had scooped out a perfect picture of the Sun God from the mud all around. A perfect circle of silver-grey rock, he said, in the middle of a sea of mud. " I was silent for a while. There was something tugging at a loose end in my mind. I felt that irritating anticipation you feel when something is just about to pop into prominence in your mind and then will not. I blinked my eyes hard and shook my head to clear my thoughts. "Where?" I demanded. "Where was it?" He pointed. "Over there, on the flank of the hill. " I stared hard in the direction he was pointing. Nothing. I could see nothing.
"How big was this circle?"
"I don't know. Athyr did not say, and I did not think to ask him. " I mumbled a curse, scouring the hillside with my eyes, willing the Sun God's portrait to be there. But there was nothing. And then my stomach churned as I remembered what had caused the tugging at the loose end in my mind: a hot, dusty summer day in Germany, twenty-odd years earlier. We had been marching all day and had stopped for a ten-minute rest. I hadn't even had the energy to unload my gear; I sat hunched on a milestone by the side of the road, staring blindly at the dust that covered the cobbled road surface.
There had been thunder growling around for most of the afternoon, but the rain had held off. As I sat there, a scattering of big, fat, heavy raindrops fell sullenly around me. It was literally just a scatter of drops, each one of which left its own singular mark in the dust: a perfect circle, a blob of water in the middle of a perfect circle of dust thrown up around it like a wall. If I had not been so tired I would never have seen it. As it happened, the first one that I did see just happened to land right in the centre of the very cobblestone I was staring at. I was mildly surprised by the perfection of the shape it had caused, and I looked at the next one closest to it for the sake of idle comparison. And they were all the same!
All the same size and all the same perfect shape, not only on the stones in the road, but in the dust by the roadside. I was sitting in a field of tiny, perfect circles. And then the centurion started yelling and I forgot all about it in the renewed agony of the long march.
I had remembered it again a couple of days later, however, when we arrived at the end of our march and were installed in camp. The dust was thick everywhere, and our centurion had detailed a couple of men, of whom I was one, to wet down the area surrounding the tribune's tent. I tried then to reproduce the effect of those raindrops, scattering drops high into the air and watching how they fell. Sometimes it worked and sometimes it didn't. It seemed to depend on the size of the drops of water. Big drops just splattered everywhere. It wasn't important to me, just a matter of curiosity, and when the other fellows around noticed what I was doing and started to mock me, I felt foolish and quit.
For months after, however, I became very conscious of the effects of falling rain. I saw how it landed on water, creating circular ripples. Eventually I lost interest in the phenomenon and forgot all about it, until one day about five years later when we got caught on the extreme edge of a freak summer hailstorm, and I saw the same circle effect in the dust of the field we were crossing.
I hadn't thought about it in years, and yet it had been there at the bottom of my consciousness, waiting to be remembered. Now I had recalled it, and it excited me. I remembered that my father had found the skystone at the bottom of a hole — a hole punched by the fury of its descent from the sky. And old Athyr had seen a circle in the mud on the hillside, a circle big enough to attract his attention.
My reverie was interrupted by Luceiia, who had been silent for a long time. "Shouldn't we go down and take a look at the boulders, Publius?" I smiled at her delicacy in not pointing out that she was freezing to death sitting up there on an exposed hilltop.