This has been a bitter lesson. I know now how my father feels, and why. I know why he set his face so adamantly against crusading, and against my going. I pray I may yet receive his forgiveness for my wilful disobedience.
Padraig, wise priest that he is, tells me I have no need to ask that which has been granted a thousand times already. He says the teaching of the Cele De is that each man must follow the light he is given, and that pilgrims on the True Path can never stray so long as they follow the Holy Light. I hope I have done that. God knows I have tried.
And now, dear Cait, my thoughts and prayers are turning ever and again towards home. I long for the day when I can see you and hold you and take you upon my knee and tell you how very much I have missed seeing your bright eyes and winsome smile. One day soon -it cannot be soon enough, dear heart-when the winter-stirred seas have grown calm and the winds fair, Padraig and I will raise sail and steer a homeward course. Rest assured, there is a good fast ship awaiting us, and once we loose the moorings there will be no more stopping, no more adventures, until we reach the Caithness coast.
In my heart, I am already on that homebound ship. Indeed, I can almost feel the fresh northern wind on my face and hear the ropes sing as fair Persephone bounds over the waves, carrying us around the broad headland and into the bay below Banvard.
What will I bring with me?
Many extraordinary memories, a few scars, a little wisdom. I will bring the parchments the good brothers have so faithfully and carefully prepared. I will bring the Black Rood, of course, and that would be prize enough. Even so, I will bring with me another treasure: Sydoni herself, to be your mother, and my wife.
Dearest Cait, I know you will love her as much as I do. I pray the Swift Sure Hand smooths the way before us, for I cannot wait to see the two of you together under the same roof. When I have my family around me once more, I promise never again to let the wild, red-heathered hills of Scotland out of my sight. That is a vow I shall gladly keep.
EPILOGUE
November 30, 1901: Paphos, Cyprus
Paphos glistens in the warm autumn light. The white-washed houses of the fishermen shimmer as I gaze out upon a bay of hammered silver. The late afternoon air is soft and scented with lemon blossom, and I have been drowsing over my work far longer than I intended.
Here in this ancient fishing village, bathed by the sun and soft Mediterranean air, everyday life in rain-lashed Scotland seems very far away indeed. As Caitlin and I amble along the winding streets of this charming, quiet town it is difficult to imagine the bone-chilling North Sea gales roaring through Edinburgh as winter prepares to wring the final ounce of forbearance from the tough Scottish soul before grudgingly relinquishing its allotted span to a grim and dismal spring.
I exaggerate neither whit nor whisker when I say I have spent the most thoroughly luxurious and enjoyable holiday of my entire life. Although we have been here but a few weeks, I feel as if I know the timeless rhythms of village life like a native. In short, I am enamoured of this little island and its old-fashioned, homely charms. It may be dotty romanticism-the affliction of the Scotsman abroad – but I believe the local people have taken us to heart. At least, we have been here long enough for the Cypriots to begin to accept us as something more than the novelty we obviously are.
The little ladies-fishwives and widows, for the most part, dressed in black from head to foot, elaborate black shawls around their shoulders-now greet us enthusiastically when they see us on our morning expeditions to the market. And the shopkeepers and stallholders make much over Caitlin. Everyone wants to touch her; they pat her hands and stroke her hair, and treat her as if she were a goddess dropped into their midst: Aphrodite reborn as a Presbyterian with the smile of an angel and a voice that purrs in a rich Scottish brogue.
So enchanted with Cyprus are we, that I find myself hankering after a little cottage in Kato Paphos where Gait and I can potter around when my days of legal beavering are over. In the scant few weeks since our arrival, I feel myself positively reborn. I suppose the years of dull lawyering have taken their toll. Without my noticing, I had gradually sunk into the deadening routines of the dutiful drudge, going about my mundane affairs. Life had dwindled down to a comfortable, not to say monotonous, sameness that is as deadly to the soul as any sin.
I know now why I was sent to this haven-and why it was necessary for Caitlin to accompany me. Over the past few weeks I have been on a quest-a pilgrimage, if you like-which has transformed me utterly. I now know who I am and, more importantly, my ancestry and pedigree. I now know that my election to the Seven was no accident of chance. I belong to an ancient and noble lineage.
In these last blessed days of light and warmth before the darkness and cold of battle descends, I have been given an inestimable gift to carry me through the bitter times ahead.
In these last days, I have recaptured something of the intoxicating recklessness and abandon that I experienced when I last put pen to paper in that white-hot blaze of incendiary vision. At the time, I truly felt that I was losing my mind; that if I left off writing, even for a moment, the tenuous thread of sanity would slip from my sweaty grasp, and I would plunge headlong into the bottomless pit of dementia, there to live out my days perpetually seeking the thing I had lost, but never remembering what it was, or why it should matter so.
Such was the fever that drove me.
I have, of course, read that much-blotted missive-not once only, but several times, and am convinced in my own mind, at least, that I have made a credible job of setting forth the truth of what was communicated to me that night in the crypt. I mention this now, because if I imagined that my own pilgrimage had reached its conclusion, that notion was shattered forever at Ayios Moni.
Day after day, as I poured over the ancient manuscript, teasing out the meaning of that long-dead language, the fire slowly rekindled. And, upon turning over the last leaf, the transformation begun when I touched that bundle of mouldering parchment was complete. I see now that the lineage is long, and the quest begun all those ages ago continues. Where it will end, I cannot say, but I know I am in good company. Like Duncan, I am learning that, however dark and uncertain the path, we never travel alone: there are angels along the way waiting to help and befriend us.
Brave, stalwart Duncan seems to me, in many ways, closer than a brother. Almost an entire millennium stands between his day and mine, and yet I can hear his voice speaking to me across the years as if he were hovering at my shoulder. However mistaken I may be, I feel as if I know him as I have known few others. Moreover, I am reconfirmed in the realization that not only are the past and present woven of the same thread, the past is neither dead nor distant; it continues to exert a genuine and potent force on both present and future, on all that is and is to come.
In these last days I have come to believe that we are none of us so estranged from our ancestral heritage that we no longer feel its age-old rhythm in the pulse and flow of the blood through our veins. The lives of previous generations can be traced in the lines of our hands and the meditations of our hearts. For we are not ourselves alone; we are all that has gone before.