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came here, I told you that you must choose whether to accept your destiny or
turn aside.
I followed you, didn t I?
You did, he replied. But now that you have glimpsed something of the shape of
that destiny, I must ask you again. He rose to his feet. Rise, Arthur.
James stood, and Embries put his hands on his shoulders.
Are you ready to take the throne of Britain? he asked. Will you assume your
duties as the sovereign King of your country?
I will.
Embries smiled. Here is where it begins. Cupping a hand to James neck, he
embraced him once and then held him at arm s length. You ll never know how long
I have waited for this day.
Sixteen
The flight back to Blair Morven was swift and uneventful. Though exhausted in
every nerve and sinew, James could not sleep. The most profound event of his life
had occurred an incident of unrivaled consequence and he was reeling. It felt
as if he had been strapped to a rocket engine and flown to the stars and back. Head,
heart, hands everything: even the soft ground beneath his feet pulsed and
tingled with singular vitality.
Although he did not fully comprehend what it all meant the deepest significance
would elude him yet a little longer he knew deep in his bones that he had passed
beyond some boundary normally closed to human beings and walked awhile in
another realm of existence.
As the chopper sped northward, he sat in the thrumming cocoon of sound and
watched the green hills and spidery lines of roads far below. Gazing idly at the
landscape sliding smoothly by below, his mind was on Caer Lial and the multitude of
feelings awakened there.
How, he wondered, could I even begin to explain what has happened to me? Have
I lived before? Or has the spirit of a previous age been born in me somehow? Or
is there some other even more fantastic explanation?
James had never set much store in reincarnation the endless return of souls to
bodies for the tedious expiation of sins committed in previous lives. The human soul
was not a glass bottle to be relentlessly recycled time and time again. One chance
was all anyone got that is what he believed. One chance, and one chance only, so
you had to do your best, you had to make it count.
But if not reincarnation, then what?
James didn t know. All he could say was that he lost nothing in the transaction, only
gained. His perspective on life had changed, and he now viewed the world from a
slightly different angle, but his personality the part of him he knew to be himself
had not altered. Insofar as he could tell, he was still the same person he d always
been. Only now he remembered& what?
What, after all, did he really remember?
A few hazy images, brief snatches of faces, the reassuring sound of another name
falling on his ear. Not much, in actual fact.
Yet, and yet, the sense that he had at last come home remained strong in him. That,
and the perception of recognition filled him with a powerful conviction: he knew who
he had been and where he had lived. He remembered Caer Lial and the people there
because they were in some way part of himself.
He could no more explain how this could be than he could define why a star-dusted
sky filled him with such knee-weakening awe, or why the sight of geese flying across
the moor sent an arrow of bittersweet longing through his heart, or why the taste of
wild raspberries always made him smile.
If not for the strong sense of familiarity, of things remembered, the strangeness of
the experience might have overwhelmed him completely. What had happened was
strange, passing strange and going a long way towards bizarre; there was no denying
that. At the same time, he felt a distinct rightness to the experience that reassured
him in the face of what could only be logically described as a particularly outlandish
hallucination.
There was no logical, rational way to account for this. Even to say he had
experienced a vision or hallucination brought on by stress, or sleep deprivation,
merely begged the question. A fellow too long without sleep might see pink
polka-dotted dragons, but he didn t see the faces of people he knew in another life.
But it wasn t another life, James argued with himself, it was this one, this same life.
This same life, only in another time.
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