Monk's Maze

Chapter 2-1

Chapter TwoTheseus nudged his nose into Colin’s side.

“I’m tired, go away.”

He butted Colin hard enough to hurt.

“Stupid cat.” He went to shove it aside and instead of a friendly, furry lardbutt of an animal begging to be scratched under the chin, he was holding a piece of rough wood.

He opened one eye.

He held a piece of ornately carved oak.

He followed the length of it upward until he had to squint against the bright sun. Celtic symbology intermixed with geometrics that mimicked technology of a more recent age.

At the other end of the ornate shaft stood a massive silhouette backlit by the shining sun. A giant.

“I’m na a cat. Stupid or otherwise.”

Okay. Reassessment. A giantess.

What was a giantess doing in his cell? And he didn’t recall setting his cell walls to wake him with a painfully blinding light.

He turned to look around but his hood blocked his view. Shoving it back out of the way, the night came thudding back into his mind.

Iona.

Cold.

Downpour of rain in the night.

As many rocks as there were blades of grass. And his back felt as if he’d slept on every one.

Behind him, not even two meters behind him, was a great stone wall that some part of his training instantly cataloged as the museum. The stone of the ancient infirmary was more weathered than in his training holos, but there was no mistaking the long, low building.

He’d spent the everlasting miserable night not two meters from shelter.

His handlight lay within easy reach of his right hand.

The final indignity.

When he leaned over for it, the giantess slapped his hand painfully aside with her staff.

“Na weapons.”

The accent was an odd mixture. It was modern English, but with a heavy Scots brogue laid over top of it. It made her voice sound musical and ancient at the same time.

The “na weapon” rule clearly didn’t apply to her. The butt of the staff still loomed threateningly above him as his hand throbbed. His eyes tracked it back and forth like a hypnotist’s lightcatcher as he spoke carefully.

“It isn’t a weapon. Just a handlight I dropped in the night and couldn’t find.”

The staff twitched to a halt.

“A light?”

“Yes. A light. No more. No less.” He picked it up slowly and blinked it on and off for her benefit.

Her staff held for a long moment as if frozen in time, then lowered to the ground by her feet. She leaned upon it heavily as her shoulders relaxed.

“Then I’m na mad.” Her voice, menacing and gruff before, now sounded low and barely louder than the light morning breeze. Light breeze. No hint of the storm that had tortured him through the night except as sparkling droplets on the bobbing grass blades.

He sat up slowly. “I have insufficient data to properly assess that conclusion.”

His leg tested okay. Sore. His trousers still caked a bit with blood, but mostly rinsed out by the rain.

“However, it has been my general observation that the ability to pose the question negates itself, and therefore there is a high likelihood that you are not mad simply because you can pose the question regarding the veracity of your own intellectual process.”

“Do ye always spout such nonsense so easily?”

He thought of the other monks on New Kells always teasing him. “Your desire to quantify outweighs Brother Jack’s desire to eat.” Even Brother David agreed. The old taskmaster had insisted that he should relax and just go play once in a while. He’d tried. It hadn’t worked very well at all. There had been a particularly disastrous game of glowball ending in an exceptionally painful, broken arm, the first known injury in the history of the game.

The giant’s face remained hidden in shadow by the bright halo of the sun reflecting off her shadow of hair.

“Yes. I’m told I do.” But for all his foibles, when they selected someone to return to Earth, they had selected him. When someone had to come back to test humankind’s readiness, they had selected him of all insane choices.

She laughed.

He struggled to rise, but stopped when the staff twitched back toward his chest. It took him several moments to discern that he was intended to grab it, which he did, carefully.

With a sharp, powerful yank, she hauled him to his feet and now he could see her clearly. Tall, taller than he was. Her black hair fell in thick, sloppy waves past her shoulders, much of the way to her waist. Her face was tanned but the natural tone was very light. And her eyes, the gray of the sea after a storm beneath strong, dark brows.

Her clothes were not what he’d been hoping for at all. There was no hint of mass manufacturing. The woolen coat didn’t have a seal-seam or even a zipper. Overlarge toggle buttons held together the hand-woven material of the coat. It was of good craftsmanship, but no machine had been a part of the process. Woolen leggings and cobbled boots completed her attire. No jewelry upon her fingers.

He was staring. Bad form, Colin.

“Hi, I’m Colin Clark. Are you one of the guardians?”

“A Guardian?” She leaned in to inspect him.

How was it that a single gesture could make him feel so stupid? Clearly a Guardian must be somehow marked. He could hear the title as she spoke it.

So, no one awaited the return of the Order of Iona. No one had been left to protect Iona for future need.

“Ah, no. I guess not. Not a Guardian. Now that I look at you.” Babbling, Col. Shut up. Now. “Nope, not a Guardian at all.” After just two centuries the monks of Iona were forgotten as if they’d never existed. As if they’d never been the chief advisors to the world’s leaders.

“And what be wrong with how I look?”

“Um.” His head hurt trying to unravel how to answer that one. His training had included interaction with women, but his monkish existence had given him no depth of experience. And surely offered him no way to answer that question safely. He looked about for a new topic.

The museum entry gaped open just a few steps along the wall from where he’d lain throughout the night.

“Sad, Col, really sad.” He muttered to himself as he moved over to look in. Bits and pieces of a hundred stone crosses stood or lay about the room. The roof had caved in and shattered pieces of red and brown slate lay like a tattered blanket over everything within. Perhaps it would not have been the safest shelter during last night’s raging storm. Only the great cross at the west end of the room still stood.

St. John’s. The largest Celtic stone cross ever built. Its arms longer than Colin’s own. The great ring connecting the arms, the trademark of so many Celtic crosses, was developed here, on this island, just to support those magnificent arms. St. John’s cross was an odd mixture of original stone and clear plastic where pieces had been permanently lost. But the stone still displayed its carvings. Serpent and moon embossing still showed clear from their creator’s hands over fifteen hundred years before.

The carvings!

He slapped his forehead, even as he started moving. All of the training sessions. All of the practice and he’d forgotten the first step in the Plan. The reason he’d landed upon Iona rather than near some population center.

He bolted from the museum and ran right into the woman who stood in the entryway.

She stumbled and fell backward among the rocks. He reached to help her, then took his hand back. He hadn’t touched a woman in twenty-five years. Not since they’d taken him from Arianna’s arms as they napped together, two nine-year olds exhausted by a long afternoon’s swim in the shallow, warm lakes of New Kells. He tried to reach out again, but she shook her head and he withdrew it again. And she began struggling to her feet.

What had he just been thinking?

The carvings!

The crosses leading to the maze. To St. Columba’s maze. The founder of the island.

Turning, he faced the great mass of the Benedictine Abbey and staggered back against the wall for a moment. The home of the Order on Iona. Pink and gray granite soared above him. Somehow he’d walked completely around it last night and wound up at the museum without knowing he was so close.

He shook his head.

“Stop getting caught up in the trivia, Brother Colin.”

“Yes, Brother David,” he ground out through gritted teeth.

He trotted up the narrow path between museum and abbey. The thick spring grasses fell softly to either side as he moved forward. Around the northwest corner of the abbey—and there they were.

The stone crosses of Iona still stood in reality, just as they had in the simulator. The grass was more lush, and much wetter. The air colder. The sky shone richer, more sparkling blue than the pinkish sky of New Kells. Blue as if washed clean by the night’s rain.

But the three crosses stood tall, unchanging with time.

The great concrete mass of St. John’s, the replica of the bits and pieces in the museum. The short stub of St. Matthew’s, still taller than a man.

And St. Martin’s.

It was beautiful.

The Plan remained on track.

Lack of televisor contact with the inhabitants of Earth had made him cross off one whole branch of possibilities from the Plan. The Second Dark Ages had left the Earth without technology. They were yet pre-industrial, if his instruments were to be trusted. Another whole branch of the Plan gone.

But as long as St. Martin’s stood, the warp and woof of the Plan was strong and the whole cloth would survive.

He rushed forward to touch it. To make sure it was real, not just mist or dream.

Something slammed into him from behind.

“And I thought I was the crazy one? What are ye, a fool?” Meghan yelled at him. She jumped back from his prostrate figure and raised her staff.

There was no one on Earth mad enough to run toward the cursed crosses of Iona.

He didn’t move.

Didn’t groan when she poked at his ribs.

She levered him over and dodged aside. But he merely flopped onto his back like a sack of wet cloth.

A large knot was forming upon his brow, a trickle of blood ran down into the thin brown hair by his temple. But at least he was still breathing. Deep in the grass, a stone lay, exactly where his head had fallen. She flicked it aside with the tip of her staff.

A loud thwack.

It had hit the cross.

The cross!

She spun to face it.

Barely half a dozen paces away.

It towered to twice, three times her height.

And her stone had awoken it.

Its heat pulsed down upon her.

Angry waves that could pound the mightiest boulder to nothing but sand.

Her knees let go beneath the pressure.

Her year on Iona had finally taken its toll.

Her vision narrowed.

A dark tunnel.

No light at the far end.

Her mind was gone.

Her life, done.

She was being rocked. Deep in the bosom of the earth. Wrapped in a cocoon of soft earth and springtime. Rocked as her mother had rocked her before her own death. It was her mother’s arms that held her even now and the ten-year-old Meghan tried to snuggle up, only to find cold, fleshless ribs. Looking up into the face, the crushed side of her mother’s skull was caked in blood, her long black hair tangled about her neck as if she’d been hung by it. The broken red mass fell slowly forward as if to kiss the ten-year-old held in her lap and instead spilling gore down the child’s face. And the girl screamed.

Meghan jerked awake and sat bolt upright in a chill sweat that denied the sun beating down upon her. She’d often dreamed of her mother, but not that vividly since her youth. Not since the long chain of foster homes had finally ended at sixteen. She could still see the caved-in roof. Could still see her childlike hands digging in the rubble. Finding her parents. Crushed.

She scrubbed at her face trying to shed the nightmare. Her eyes focused on the landscape.

A different nightmare was here. And it was far more real.