A week later Stonehenge was abandoned. Where the wicker man had been, there was only cold ash with a smattering of blackened bone. The druids had gone back to the hills, hiding from the brigands who now roamed the land and eking out a living from the countryside. So it had been for centuries, so it continued. The stones had seen many invaders, many worshippers. And they would see more in the future.
The sky was gray and a light rain was falling, blown about by a stiff breeze. In the middle of the megalithic arrangement, the outline of the doorway reappeared on the left standing stone of the center pair. It slid open and one person appeared garbed in black robes. Noting the rain, the figure pulled back her hood. She resembled the old woman who had first entered, but fifty years younger. Instead of age-withered flesh, her face was smooth and pink. Her hair was coal-black. She turned her face upward, allowing the rain to fall on it. The falling water mixed with the rivulet of tears on her face.
She had tried and failed as she had feared. Gwalcmai was truly dead. After all the years they had been together. She reached back into the stone and pulled the litter out with the old body tied to it.
Reluctantly she stepped out of the entryway, pulling the litter, and the door closed behind her, then disappeared. She slowly walked through the stones, onto the plain, pulling his body. She passed the site of the wicker man, sparing it not even a glance, and continued. When she reached a small ridge, just before she was out of sight of Stonehenge, she turned and looked back.
It was dusk and the rain had ceased. She could see the stones in the distance. She felt very, very alone, a slight figure in the midst of a huge plain. She went to a lone oak tree, its branches withered and worn. It was a living sentinel overlooking the stones. Using a wooden spade, the woman dug into the dirt, carving out a grave. It took her the entire night to get deep enough.
As the first rays of the sun tentatively probed above the eastern horizon, she climbed out of the hole. Her robe was dirty, her dark hair matted with mud, the fresh skin on her palms blistered from the labor.
She took her husband and slid him into the hole she had made. Her hand rested on his cheek for many long minutes before she reluctantly climbed out of the grave. She reached inside her pocket and pulled out the small broken amulet. She stared at it for a while, then reached inside her robe and retrieved a chain holding a similar object, this one undamaged. She added the damaged one to the chain around her neck and held it for a moment, tracing the lines. Then she looked down at her husband and spoke in their native tongue.
“Ten thousand years. I loved you every day of those many years. And I will remember and love you for the next ten thousand.”
With tears streaming down her face, she threw the first spadeful of dirt into the grave.
PROLOGUE: FROM THE PAST TO THE PRESENT
Area 51 is ninety miles northwest of Las Vegas, in the middle of nowhere on the way to nowhere, established on land that held no value other than its isolation and what had been hidden there years ago. Numerous mountains surrounded the dry lake bed; land the US government had gobbled up to make the location secure.
During World War II, in a cavern inside Groom Mountain, a massive alien spaceship had been discovered; the mothership. Not only had the mothership been discovered there, but also directions to the location of nine smaller atmospheric craft, nicknamed bouncers by the test pilots who subsequently learned to fly them. Test flights of bouncers over the years after World War II had led to reports of alien sightings and fueled speculation among the general public about what was hidden at the base in the Nevada desert. The speculation was mostly right, but grossly underestimated the reality.
From the very beginning, the existence of Area 51 had been classified at a higher level than anything had ever been in the United States: A committee — Majestic-12—had been immediately established to oversee the alien artifacts and granted powers by a presidential decree that allowed it to do as it pleased. For over fifty years Majestic kept the discovery secret from foreign nations and American citizens alike as it tried to find out who had put the ship there and why.
Unfortunately, Majestic hadn’t been able to discover the truth about the mothership or the aliens: that Earth had been visited by aliens over ten thousand years ago who had headquartered themselves on a large island in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean — the legendary Atlantis. And that when other aliens of the same species, the Airlia, had arrived thousands of years later, there was civil war among them.
The initial group of aliens had been led by Aspasia; the second wave by Artad. The battling resulted in the destruction of Atlantis and a tenuous truce. Aspasia was banished to an Airlia base underneath the surface of Mars at Cydonia where human astronomers had long been intrigued by anomalies on the surface. The two primary sites were nicknamed the Face and the Fort based on the observed shapes. Artad and his followers went to China, underneath the massive tomb of Qian-Ling, and like Aspasia and his people, went into suspended animation.
Why the aliens had fought among themselves remained a mystery. During the Third World War, both sides had issued proclamations to the United Nations. Each claimed it had been sent to Earth to protect mankind from an interstellar threat by another alien race called the Swarm. And each claimed that the other side had tried to withdraw from this task and hide on Earth, ruling mankind as Gods.
Despite the Atlantis Truce, each side had continued a subversive war throughout the millennia on Earth. Aspasia’s side was represented by the Mission, led by a continually regenerated human known as Aspasia’s Shadow, who passed Aspasia’s memories and personality through succeeding generations via the ka, a memory device that could be updated much like a computer hard drive. Artad’s side was represented by the Ones Who Wait, Airlia-Human clones, and Shadows of Artad, such as King Arthur and Shi Huangdi, the first emperor of China.
Throughout human history both groups fought covertly, using humans as pawns in their battles. The tenuous truce began to unravel when a guardian computer was discovered at a dig at Temiltepec in South America by Majestic-12 and brought back to Area 51’s secret sister base at Dulce, New Mexico. The guardians were small golden pyramids that had been secreted around the world by the Airlia. When a guardian came in contact with a human it initiated a direct mind-computer interface through which the guardian would take control and turn the person into a Guide, who would do as the computer programmed him or her to. The members of Majestic were corrupted in this manner, prompting Presidential Science Adviser Lisa Duncan to send a covert operative named Mike Turcotte to infiltrate Area 51 and discover what was going on.
Turcotte had learned that Majestic was preparing to fly the mothership on programmed orders from the guardian, most likely to go to Mars and pick up Aspasia and his followers. He also found information on Easter Island that indicated that initiating the mothership’s interstellar engine would attract the attention of the Swarm and bring destruction to Earth. Turcotte foiled that plan and all-out civil war had once more erupted between the two Airlia sides, the human race caught between them, resulting in the Earth’s Third World War.
Prior to the war, Turcotte and the others had discovered much, but they still didn’t know the full extent of this alien interference in human history. What they did know were just terrifying glimpses into a perverted but true history of mankind. They’d learned about the clash between Arthur (Artad’s Shadow) and Mordred (Aspasia’s Shadow) in early England; the development and spread of the Black Death in the Middle Ages by Artad’s followers; the rise of the SS in Nazi Germany, which was manipulated by Aspasia’s Shadow; the invention of the atomic bomb by the Americans prompted by their study of a similar Airlia weapon discovered underneath the Great Pyramid of Giza in the early days of World War II; and many other events throughout history. All of these were the result of efforts by one side or the other to gain the upper hand in the Airlia civil war.