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.