Indiana Jones and the White Witch Read online

  He forced his attention back to the road. "Gale, how much longer?"

  "Twenty minutes, perhaps."

  "You all right, girl?"

  Her answer surprised him. "No."

  He'd spend these moments better by trying to remember whatever he could of St. Brendan Glen. He'd been there before, but in the dead of night, and Gale had brought him there by the main highway that skirted around the dense forest and rugged terrain. But there was much he knew from his own studies and his years of travel through this part of England. He loved the southern part of this country, so stunning to the eye, so steeped in history, the ground almost hallowed with memories of races and cultures and religions long gone. This countryside had once been a bloody battleground for tens of thousands of men and horses, war machines, slashing swords and bludgeons. There was magic in the massive stone monuments of Stonehenge. Arthur and his knights had lived and loved here. Indy thought of Camelot. Of Utherpendragon and Merlin, of Excalibur and Caliburn. Of the Lady of the Lake... the marvelous intertwining of myth and fact, legend and reality that was known as the "mother of Britain."

  It was not so simple a matter for an outsider to draw hard conclusions as to what was solid rock and what might be a phantom mountain. Whatever existed here had been sustained for more than a thousand years longer than Indy's own country even existed. Whatever it all was, it defied science, laughed at logic, tugged at the heartstrings, and sang of life and love and tradition.

  Indy had always wanted acceptance within the inner circle here in the New Forest. Difficult enough for an Englishman; until now, impossible for a man considered barely one step above the savages English explorers had encountered during the colonial days of that strange faraway land called America.

  Indy laughed to himself—at himself. He was like a colonist visiting a new and strange land.

  His laughter faded in his mind. He wished fervently to banish the scent of death, the knife of pain he could almost feel emanating from Gale the closer they came to the Glen.

  "S-slow down, Indy." Gale was forcing the words out. She was nearly doubled over. "It will be better," she gasped, "when we cross the line and enter the circle."

  Indy slowed into a hairpin turn. A huge tree trunk blocked the road and Indy hit the brakes. Through broken branches he saw eyes peering at him and Gale. She rose in her seat, looking directly at the eyes. Then she slid down slowly.

  Indy turned to look again at the tree blocking the road. Before his eyes it began to fade, until suddenly it wasn't there anymore. He shifted into gear; this time he didn't need Gale's words to tell him to go ahead.

  They rounded another turn. He felt as if they drove suddenly through a field, a force field of some kind. Whatever it was, it made his entire body tingle, raised the hair on his arms and the back of his neck. Even his teeth seemed to respond to a vibration he couldn't place. Then it was gone and he knew they were on the other side of what Gale described as "the circle."

  Finally he was in St. Brendan Glen.

  All about him was death and horror.

  3

  St. Brendan Glen had remained a magical enclave for more than a thousand years. Its cottages were hewn of strong forest wood and buttressed with stones on all sides to withstand violent storms. The houses rose along hillsides, in ravines, on upward slopes, a fairyland of mystical structures, smoke drifting from chimneys, walks of wood and stone winding through flower beds of riotous color. In the near distance loomed a great hall, to Indy looking strangely like ancient Viking gathering places. The Glen people farmed their land, rode horses of magnificient stock, worked herds of goats and sheep and cattle. There were dogs aplenty, many pets, but huge Irish wolfhounds were trained as sentries and protectors of women and children. The Glen was a holdout from the past that had carefully blended in with the technology and science of the present, although the latter was so subdued it seemed barely to exist. The Glen made full use of electricity, but all the power lines were buried deeply so as not to offend the eye and clash with nature at its finest.

  This was the St. Brendan family of Wicca in the New Forest, remote and magical, part of earth and nature, where ancient legends were still believed and observed, where the land seemed of a time and nature separate from the England lying beyond the forest.

  Then came the "invaders." Indy had seen their handiwork when he looked down from the training airplane. The spears of flame, the numbing shock waves; they could only be the largest of the blasts he knew were ripping through the forest community.

  His worst fears were now before his eyes. This slice of earth, so much in harmony with nature and history, had been raided with all the butchery marking mass slaughters of the past. Bodies of men, women, and children were still sprawled, twisted like rag dolls in pools of dark red. Everywhere those who could fend for themselves were aiding the wounded. Thick smoke swirled about, billowing from houses still aflame, tongues of fire crackling amid the tree branches. People, bloodied and hurt, had formed bucket brigades, bringing water from the streams to prevent the fires from spreading.

  Gale had asked that Indy remain by the car. Few people knew his face, and the air was thick with emotion. But Indy found it impossible simply to stand by as a spectator. He joined a line of people passing water buckets up a slope. The people to each side of him took an instant to study his face. No questions. He was aiding; he was no longer a stranger. When the fires were damped, he moved to the injured, helped with first aid, carried the most badly hurt on stretchers to the communal building atop the hill.

  Hours passed. Time to try again to match the past with this devastating present. Indy had never before been in the Glen, yet he knew of St. Brendan, isolated within the gullied forest. There was no way to avoid this community so close to Stonehenge and its deeply mystical and religious ties to ancient times. Stonehenge, where stood the ring of giant stones that still baffled modern-day scientists, cast a spell of energy down through Salisbury Plain and all its holdings.

  And the world-familiar ring of stones atop the hill of Stonehenge was but one central part of a far-flung pattern of ancient sites where the men and women of thousands of years past had charted the movement of planets and stars with an accuracy that defied modern-day science. The standing stones and mark stones were not restricted to the plain of Salisbury; they were found throughout the British Isles. They were so much more than huge stones weighing hundreds of tons; their structure, their shaping, their very arrangement formed an astonishing geometric pattern from which strange and powerful energies flowed across the countryside.

  No two sites were alike. The stones, twenty and even forty feet high, sometimes stood on hard ground, rearing into the sky, monoliths around which the lives of the ancients revolved. Others were like great spears lanced deeply into the earth. Rudstone at Rudston and the Devil's Arrows at Boroughbridge in Yorkshire had been erected by some unknown, even unimaginable force. Today powerful machines and hundreds of men would be required even to move these structures, let alone drive them into resisting surface.

  Indy had discovered the hard way that the stories about energies collected in these sacred sites were painfully true. The reality was all the more confounding because every attempt to "catch" such energies with scientific instruments, scanning for electrostatic, magnetic, or other known sources, were dismal failures. They indicated only stones of special and particular shape. Other instruments searched along the known spectrum, in the ultraviolet and the infrared. Nothing. So he was dealing with energies that might even be imaginary. But how could imagination exert a physical force? It might not be measurable with an instrument, but it could be powerful medicine when it swept into and against the human body.

  Indy had tried everything he knew to learn about the energy folklore that had grown up around the consecrated circle of Stonehenge. It was a frustrating period of chasing shadows, or ghosts of what once was or once might have been—if it existed at all. He had pored over the thick volumes relating to Merlin, who had referred to Stonehe
nge as the Chorea Gigantum. Down through the ages, it was known also as the "Giant's Ring" and, with stronger reference to the energies locked in the great circle of stones, as the "Dance of the Giants." According to the ancient scribe who slowly and carefully penned the records, the great stones had to be positioned according to an ancient and long-lost formula.

  There was more to this positioning, Indy concluded, than simply measuring the sweep of celestial bodies, a simple yet brilliant astronomical calendar accurate to the split second over a full year. That was the visible, obvious purpose.

  But Merlin—all, if he could only know for certain the existence and powers of this remarkable wizard! Merlin had demanded that the huge rocky masses of Stonehenge be positioned in such a way that they became an instrument tuned to invisible powers. That instrument played on those powers in a manner similar to a catgut bow drawn across the strings of a bass viol, producing a deep, groaning, yet melodious sound not attainable through any other instrument.

  All energy follows patterns, Indy deduced, whether from a steam engine or a trumpet or a whatzit. Invisible energy wasn't magic; radio waves were as commonplace as wind and sunshine. Was the energy of the great stones, so carefully locked into position by order of Merlin, on the order of radio waves?

  Indy concocted a homing antenna of his own design to discover a particular radio frequency, respond to that frequency, and then point unerringly to the source of the radio wave.

  For power, he judged he could use the energy of his own body. After all, the human body is a biological-electrical machine. You could prove this easily enough if you grasp the end of the antenna connected to a radio. Immediately the reception grows stronger and the signal clearer. In this case the human body is an antenna.

  He built a carrying frame about his chest and back, the antenna loop running to the extent of his outstretched arms and over his head. He felt self-conscious about wearing this strange device. Looking like an idiot is almost too much to ask, he lamented to himself. Suitably ensconced in his contraption, he climbed a ladder to a high flat rock, larger than a motorcar, at Stonehenge.

  He still felt a bit silly until he began to turn, his body and his contraption acting as a huge loop antenna. Silliness evaporated when an electrical shock lashed through his body, right down to the soles of his feet. Mouth agape, he continued his turn and was astonished to see tiny electrical fires, tongues of blue flame, crackling about his mouth. Sucking in air created a tiny field of electrostatics, enough at this point (with Indy so perfectly matched to the energies of Stonehenge) to create the equivalent of rubbing cat's fur briskly with a brush. He almost fell, clamped his mouth shut, tasted the ozonelike burn of electricity, and then froze.

  Not because he wanted to. He was locked absolutely in this position. Heat flashed up from his feet through his body; he saw a white light surrounding him, followed by a thunderclap and an invisible hand that seemed to smack him broadside. He flew from the stone, arms and legs flailing, to crash on the ground far below.

  Good fortune was often Indy's lot, and so it was this time. He fell sideways. His loop antenna yielded to his weight and folded slowly beneath him in a wonderful deceleration that crashed the contraption but protected his body. Except for bruises and scrapes on his face, burned lips, and singed hair along his body, he was unharmed.

  But he never again questioned that the ancients, prompted no doubt by that infernal Merlin, had devised the equivalent of a tremendous capacitor, a battery collection device that soaked up energies still unknown to modern science, and capable of unleashing that power in devastating form.

  But now Stonehenge seemed to be on the other side of the planet. What Indy wore now was dried and caked blood, soaked clothes, and mud. His hands were scraped and his muscles sore from hours of "pitching in" to help in any way he could. He had not seen Gale since they arrived but wisely accepted the fact that she would appear when time and circumstances were right.

  The cries of pain from the wounded had subsided; gone also was the crackle and snap of flames. The smoke had thinned with the coming of night. New fires appeared, this time from lamps and torches placed to light the area. They burned cleanly, with little smoke.

  Then he smelled the gorse, a natural fragrance that rushed against the smell of blood and animals and humans whose lives had been abruptly ended. There was also the stench of gunpowder, a strange odor that always reminded him of being in a great train station or the subway. Underground, he corrected himself. That's what they call it here.

  All diminished and then vanished before the fragrance of the gorse. He knew of this custom from the time he had spent with the Romanies, who bumed the bush for fragrance in fireplaces or in open campfires. It had about it the strong smell of incense, and it rode the breezes of the night air as a pleasing perfume. A smile moved fleetingly across his lips. He recalled how the Romanies, those Gypsies of the New Forest, used the smoke of the gorse to catch their dinner. They looked for pheasants in the trees above them and set gorse bushes aflame. What was pleasant to the human was a devastating drug to the birds. One good whiff and they tumbled like overweight flightless chickens to the ground.

  His own thoughts of eating proved distasteful at this moment. He moved to the trunk of a large tree, resting against the bark, and sat in a quiet half-awake, half-asleep state. Finally he fell asleep.

  He awoke to Gale kneeling before him, holding forth a silver cup. "Drink, Indy," she said quietly.

  He accepted the cup, the silver cool to his touch. The first taste told him he was drinking the alcoholic fruit of the juniper berry, almost unknown beyond the New Forest. It cleared the head and sharpened the senses. The delightful drink went down in a long, unbroken swallow. He was returning the cup to Gale and wiping his mouth with the back of his sleeve when his arm froze in midmotion.

  Standing behind and to the right of Gale, her figure outlined against a distant fire so that much of her face was still shadowy, was the woman he knew at first sight could be none other than Caitlin St. Brendan. Daughter of Kerrie and Athena St. Brendan, descendants of the family line that had ruled in this great vale for more than a thousand years.

  And Gale's lifelong friend, as close as any sister could be.

  Indy rose slowly to his feet. Caitlin's presence had struck him with almost physical force. He knew he had never before met any woman like her—any person like her.

  She stood feet apart, braced against the pain of the wounds that had torn her body. Her leather garments showed rips, tears, stains, and slashes from which her blood had flowed. Somehow he knew that most of the caked blood on her clothing was not hers.

  The great sword she held before her, the wicked point just above the ground, spoke for itself. His eyes went from the woman to the sword. Indy knew he was seeing a weapon that belonged to legend. If he was right, he beheld the fabled sword of fire.

  Caliburn.

  The sword fashioned through direct order and instructions of Merlin for King Arthur. The fighting sword of the man who held court at the Round Table. The Sword of Sacred Fire.

  Even now that seemed beyond question. Reflecting firelight, gleaming, the blade yet shone with an inner glow that came from the metal itself. Indy was struck dumb with the sight of the sword he himself had sought for years, if only to prove its existence. He had been through Glastonbury and Avalon, to the fields where the legends claimed Arthur had fought and won terrible battles. Indy had searched through abbeys and cathedrals, the halls of the great knights, the sacred assemblages of Stonehenge, and the many other portals to the past. Reports of the sword were so tantalizing they had led him on again and again when he was ready to abandon the fabled blade to the mists of legend.

  His eyes moved slowly up from the weapon to the face of the woman holding it. Strangely, he had a fleeting impression of a Cherokee Indian. Firelight reflected from high cheekbones. She was a marvel of beauty and might. Neither her broad shoulders nor powerful grasp of the sword hilt reduced the grace and femininity that so impre
ssed Indy. Jet-black hair, long and slender fingers of strength. And her neck muscles, again highlighted by the glow of nearby fires, told of athletic and muscular prowess.

  Her eyes flashed. They seemed to miss nothing as she in turn studied Indy. Their long mutual inspection gave him the opportunity to recognize both power and pain in her face. Her leather tunic again captured his eye.

  This woman should not be able to stand, let alone walk, he judged quickly. If he saw correctly, Caitlin had been wounded grievously in the battle that had taken place here. The slashes in her tunic had been made by blades that had penetrated to her body. He couldn't miss the round tears that seemed to mark where she had been hit by bullets.

  How was it possible for her still to be standing? Then he thought again of the sword. There was more to the legends of Caliburn than the blade of fire, given its great power through special alloys and the sorcery of Merlin. For this moment he put aside objections of myth and legend. Here stood a woman who seemed to have been wounded so many times that she should have been dead.

  But she was here, now, standing before him, and the legends of Caliburn became literal to him. The scabbard! That was it. If the legends were true, that is. But he'd already seen so much here that danced about the edges of reality.

  He forced his thoughts aside, but he couldn't stop thinking about the scabbard. He started to speak, held back his words, rushing memory details as quickly as he could through his mind. According to legend, the scabbard could heal any wound it touched. Its healing powers, be they magic or psychic, would begin to work immediately. And—Later, he told himself.

  Gale seemed to be in tune with the thoughts swirling in his head, even able to sense when he mentally put them aside. She lowered herself to the ground; Caitlin did the same. Obviously, the mysterious events were about to be explained.