The Rings of Poseidon (16 page)

My grandmother's story didn't take much
telling and it's probably true - well, more or less true - because
it was lacking in obvious embellishments.

Apparently my great great grandmother was a
priestess and in those far off days, before the rock from the sky,
priestesses didn't usually marry. The idea of priests and
priestesses living in the villages came after the flood when, I
suppose, people had to do more than one job.

Anyway, they - and don't ask me who 'they'
are because my grandmother doesn't seem to know - had built a
temple on the coast near a port and town on an estuary. A temple is
a place where there are lots of priests and priestesses and an
estuary is just where a proper river flows into the sea. I can't
really imagine what a port is and I don't think my grandmother can
either. I know it has something to do with unloading bigger boats.
I've only ever seen the ones they catch fish in and they pull those
up onto the beach to unload them. I suppose those in my
grandmother's story must have been bigger.

There was a big day coming up when several
cycles all came to an end together, and all of the priests and
priestesses prepared for it. Then this day a huge rock crashed out
of the sky and into the ocean somewhere beyond the island. It set
off mountains of fire and great columns of smoke. Three of the
younger priestesses including my great great grandmother ran away
to get a better view from a cliff where some mountains jutted out
into the sea and you could see the top of the sacred mountain on a
clear day. They were high up looking at the fire and smoke when a
huge wave struck the temple and the town and the boats.

The wave must have been pretty big, because
it completely washed away the temple and the town and most of the
people. My great great grandmother was upset. The three of them
were on their way down to see if there were any survivors when they
met three men on their way to higher ground. They were the only
survivors from a boat which had been coming to the port at the time
of the big wave. The boat itself had been wrecked, most of the
people aboard killed and most of the goods lost, but one of the men
was carrying a wooden box he had saved.

According to my grandmother they camped for
three days among some rocks with makeshift shelters and not much
food, while they searched unsuccessfully for survivors. They
decided they would have to search further afield and for that they
would have to split up. The women were priestesses, one of the men
was a priest, one was an engineer and the third was a young man who
had just started training as a priest. They talked over the whole
situation and finally it was decided that they would have to make
two groups of three. One group would cross the narrow stretch of
water to the big land while the other group would move along the
coast of this land. They would look for survivors, individuals
living alone, explorers and traders who had gone inland and so on.
They decided they would have to try and preserve knowledge and
re-establish the old ways. They also agreed that they would have to
mate themselves and encourage large families if they had to, since
nobody knew then how complete or extensive the disaster was.

Then the priest opened his little wooden box.
In it were six rings and a talisman to contain their strength. He
had been bringing them by boat with five other priests who were to
rule the six temples of Poseidon. Things had changed now and he
gave the rings, one each, to the six survivors. The priest also had
his ritual dagger with a polished bronze blade and a hilt worked
into the shape of a wyvern's foot.

My great great grandmother had been given one
of the rings and, for some reason, she also had the little box with
the talisman in it to look after. The priest took his dagger, one
of the priestesses and the young trainee with him and set off to
the big land. My grandmother came eastwards along the coast. She
had taught her daughter astronomy and her granddaughter - that's my
grandmother - had learnt the trade too and she taught my father who
was teaching my older sister.

The blackness of the cave was no blacker and
no less black than the moment after my fall. It was unchanging. The
silence was complete as before. If the men were still searching for
me or even my family had begun looking for me, I couldn't hear
them. Of course, unless they saw the men they wouldn't even know
where to look. I thought I had probably fallen through into this
cave just about where the rock was, which would explain why I had
fallen about twice my own height without hurting myself much.

Since it was clear nobody would come I
climbed up onto the rock, which was pretty tricky in the darkness,
because I could only do it by feel. I could just reach the roof
and, feeling around, I thought I could feel the hole I had fallen
through and imagined that the darkness was perhaps a little less
intense here. However, I still couldn't see and, what was worse, I
couldn't reach anything to get hold of so, frustrated, I had to get
down.

I wasn't sure which way I was facing or how
big the rock, and I was, not surprisingly, unsteady. I grabbed at
part of the roof for support. As I grabbed, pieces came away in my
hands. I rolled sideways in a shower of a small rocks, pebbles and
dirt. I fell a bit awkwardly with my feet first. I felt a sudden
shock in my ankle, which gave way, and I fell sideways again, this
time into nothingness. Black nothingness.

Chapter 13

Steve, Gill and Frank had sat through their
stories as if hypnotised but it was as though Manjy was sleep
walking. As her story reached its climax she first stood up and
then stood unsteadily on her chair, feeling at nothing and acting
out events as if in a trance. When it came to the fall she mimed
protecting herself from the rubble falling from above, and she did
indeed fall - and heavily too - onto the floor.

Alicia jumped up. "Are you all right?" she
asked.

Manjy opened her eyes and blinked. "Boy, that
was real!" she answered, and frowned before asking Alicia, "What
did you say?"

"I asked if you were all right. Well, are
you?"

Manjy raised herself up to a kneeling
position. "I think so." She got up slowly. "Apart from being a bit
sore here and there where I fell, I think I'm all right."

Gill said, "You're going to have some biggish
bruises by tomorrow, but I've got some arnica in the caravan."

"Oh I think bruises are all I'll have. It was
more the shock of the fall than anything."

"Still, the arnica will cut down on the
bruising." she started to rise. "Shall I get it?"

"Later."

"I'll make a cup of tea," said Steve, "that's
supposed to be good for shock," and he went to see to it as Manjy
sat shakily down again.

"Did the fall kill her?" Frank asked her as
he and Gill both sat.

"Him," she answered. "It was a boy of about
ten and yes, the fall did kill him. I don't think they even found
the hole in the floor of the cave, never mind the body."

Alicia turned towards them. "You may be all
right but I'm not sure about me," she said and sat down heavily.
"You're the first one of us not to have actually possessed the ring
in your story, which does sort of clinch the reincarnation
argument, but the story itself hints at a much higher civilisation
destroyed by floods or volcanic eruption or things from the
sky.

"I did possess the ring for a short time I
suppose," said Manjy.

"Yes, but if this was any sort of psychometry
the ring wouldn't 'know' anything about your death, if you'll
pardon the expression. You'd have been your sister or your
grandmother or something, and yet reincarnation's absurd."

"Not to me it isn't," answered Manjy,
slightly offended.

"All right," corrected Alicia, "I mean 'hard
for me to accept', possibly because I haven't had much contact with
the concept."

"I don't find it hard to accept, though,"
Alan remarked.

"After my experience with life of the
priestess I don't find the idea quite so strange," Gill added.

"But the whole story's so far fetched. It's
like Eric von Daniken or Noah's Ark or Atlantis," Alicia
persisted.

The story said a rock from the sky,"
interrupted Frank, "and there's nothing unnatural about a huge
meteor. I can even see one starting volcanic eruptions or floods,
depending on where it landed."

"All right, I grant it could happen,"
admitted Alicia, "but the odds are against it."

"Huge odds against winning the national
lottery or the euro-millions," Steve pointed out, "But someone wins
each week."

"Where on earth did you find mugs like that?
It won't cure Manjy, it'll kill her," Alicia said, stifling a
laugh. "It's nearly as big as she is."

Manjy, who was recovering her composure
somewhat, giggled.

"I've been thinking," Frank observed into the
silence that followed. "The boy in Manjy's story mentioned that the
disaster happened on a major day in their calendar. I don't know
whether the boy actually knew what the cycles were or whether he
was just repeating what his grandmother said, but if several cycles
zeroed together there could have been the Moon, Venus, the Earth
and the Sun in conjunction."

"What do you mean?" asked Steve. "In
line?"

"If these people calculated like the Mayans
did, yes. More or less, anyway."

"I don't see the significance of that,"
commented Gill.

"Well," said Frank, You'd have one hell of a
gravitational pull for a start. Just right for pulling down a large
lump of space waste, if there was such a thing passing at the
time."

"If a lump of rock crashed onto a fault line
I suppose there might be a large scale volcanic eruption," remarked
Alicia. She turned to Manjy and asked, "Where do you think you
were? Greece?"

"Somewhere hot enough to develop the idea of
a siesta," answered Manjy. "Mountainous and fairly dry but not far
from the coast."

Alicia thought aloud. "That would fit Greece,
most of the Eastern Mediterranean, parts of North Africa and the
south of Spain." she said. "Now the ring moved from southern
Britain to the Northern Isles. It probably moved to Britain from
northern France. The question is, where did it come from to reach
there? Frank's story could have been set in the foothills of the
Alps."

"Or the foothills of the Pyrenees." said
Alan. "That's a more natural northward movement towards the
channel. There are some Stone Age remains in the right places and
there are suitable mountains not far away in Spain."

"And if there had been a large island in the
Atlantic off the coast of southern Spain it might have been enough
to change the course of the gulf stream," added Steve.

"I still like Greece and the volcanic
eruption which destroyed Thera." answered Alicia.

"You said yourself that there was no room in
the conventional chronology for a copper age. If Thera is right
there certainly isn't room for it. The more civilised areas of
Europe were already beginning to use iron and we wouldn't even be
back to the beginning of the Bronze Age in the more remote parts,"
said Gill.

"Anyway," said Frank, "Wasn't Thera about
1200 BC? We're way back before that," he looked around at them for
a moment, then continued, "Steve's story must have been around 2000
BC or earlier and Gill's was before that. My story was about four
thousand BC, maybe before that, so Manjy's could be as early as
four and a half or five thousand. Maybe even earlier."

"Perhaps Alicia was one of the original
survivors of the flood or meteor or whatever," said Gill, "or even
the bloke who made the ring. We'd know the whole story if you tried
the ring. Well, we might."

"There's another thing about my story," said
Manjy.

"What's that?" asked Alicia. "Or dare I
ask?"

"Three men were after the ring. In Steve's
story it was just a feeling he had. In Gill's story she reacted
absurdly to a small incident where a traveler tried to steal the
ring. On the face of it what she did was unreasonable but an
intuitive woman felt an urge to deal drastically with the
ring."

"In Frank's story the woman actually ran away
herself because the priest wanted the ring and in my story three
men wanted it and I died misleading them. It's as if somebody wants
that ring and keeps coming back for it throughout history. And the
ring doesn't want to be found."

There was silence for a moment while they all
mulled over what Manjy had said. "That's supposing a lot," said
Alicia at length.

"I wonder if our bird watcher is after the
ring," remarked Gill and there was a stunned completeness about the
pause that brought.

"He's probably just a bird watcher," said
Frank. "There's no point in getting paranoid about it."

Manjy was thinking about her story. "Maybe
our bird watcher's a reincarnation of one of the men in my
story."

"Not very likely," said Alicia. "The odds are
against the whole series of events. Perhaps it's all some kind of
group hallucination. After all, there are hints about a higher
civilization which had reached the Bronze Age, only to be thrown
back by a natural catastrophe to another three thousand years or
more of the stone age."

"We might know if it's true though, if you
just put the ring on," Gill urged.

The rain had almost stopped as Alicia looked
out. "All right," she said at length. "It's too wet to do much yet
so I'll agree to try the ring if you'll all do a late shift on the
diggings after tea if the weather goes on improving."

The others nodded as Alicia picked up the
ring and looked at it before putting it firmly on the third finger
of her left hand, so that it looked like a wedding ring.