Douglas Niles - Circle at center

He blinked in the light of a flaring match, saw Miradel touch the flame to the wick of a fat candle. Illumination surged into the room, brighter than any candle Natac had ever seen. Miradel held a small glass crystal in one of her hands, and in the fingers of the other she pinched a small tuft of some kind of soft material.

“This is the Wool of Time,” she said, following his glance. “Trace threads drawn from the Tapestry of the Worldweaver, and used for the casting of the spell of seeing.”

“That spell is what you are doing now?”

“Yes. You should look at the wall, there.”

Natac saw that one wall of the room was smooth and whitewashed to a bright finish. It was not marred by any shelves or other features. Abruptly the light flared and then waned, and he saw from the corner of his eye that the druid had dropped the threads into the flame of the candle. Now she held up the crystal, between the candle and the wall, and again Natac’s attention turned to that unmarred surface.

He saw a brown swath there, with an appearance of bumps and other irregularities across its surface. In places there were patches of white or large stretches of green, and snaking lines of blue crossed here and there.

“You are looking at the land you called Mexico,” Miradel said. “Imagine that you are a bird flying very high… Now, picture these places: The bumps here are the hills of Tlaxcala, and this direction is west. The white splotch is the snowy cap of the great volcano, and these are the lakes in the valley of Mexico.”

Awestruck, Natac tried to follow her words, and quickly grasped the truth of what she was saying. He pointed to a shadowy notch on the border of his homeland. “There is the pass where we met the Aztecs in ambush, chased them back toward their city.”

“And where you were captured.”

“You know about that?” he asked, amazed.

“The Tapestry shows all to one who knows how to look,” Miradel replied. “I have been following your thread for a long time, so, yes, I took note of your capture, and your place in the ceremony honoring the Aztec gods.”

“I… yes, I see.” He found it disturbing that this woman, and perhaps many others, could have watched all aspects of his life. Yet he shook off that discomfort amid a growing sense of curiosity. “You can see all of Earth through this crystal?”

“Of past and present… we can only guess as to the future. Watch.” Abruptly the image on the wall began to shrink, as if the watcher were rising upward with dizzying speed. “You see the northern and southern oceans, now?”

“Yes.” Natac had heard of these great bodies of water, though he had never set eyes on either of them. Now they were blue splotches on the wall, growing larger as the vast realm of land was shrinking to a small piece of land between great seas. Indeed, he was soon stunned to see that two great continents existed, one north and the other south of his homeland. The place that he had once thought encompassed the whole world was no more than a link in a chain of lands connecting these two land masses.

“One of those lands is the place you called Europe?” he asked.

She shook her head. “Watch.”

And then even those continents were reduced, and so much of the image before him was blue water. To the right was a great stretch of ocean, and then more continents, irregular masses of green, brown, and white.

“This is Europe, here,” Miradel explained, pointing. “This is the land that will send the warriors who will destroy Tlaxcalans, the Aztecs… In time, it seems likely that all the peoples of these two continents will fall under the sway of the men from Europe.”

“Have they conquered all the rest of the world?”

“No… I will show you.”

For an hour Natac gawked at astonishing sights. He saw men like Owen and Fionn, and others who were clad in metal and rode great beasts into battle. He saw huge nations of black-skinned men, and teeming lands farther to the east in a place Miradel called the Orient. Particularly impressive was a massive wall, a battlement running across mountains, valleys, and plains, a structure that Miradel informed him could have wrapped all the realm of the Aztecs within its serpentine length. There were palaces in the Orient too, and sparkling arrows that trailed flame into the sky and then exploded in bursts of bright color. Great boats plied the rivers and coastal waters, and the sheer number of people he saw was overwhelming. Some of these were warriors, and they formed armies that darkened the ground with their numbers.

“They are so many-surely they will conquer all of Earth!” Natac exclaimed.

“There are many reasons why they will not. Here, see.” The druid narrowed the picture until he saw two great boats, each draped with white swaths of cloth. Smoke spewed from the flanks of the vessels, inflicting horrible damage upon each craft. He saw men scrambling about the decks, realized that these ‘boats’ were in fact the size of small palaces, with multiple floors. Quickly he understood that they were propelled by the wind, that the great sheets of cloth were in fact arrayed like vertical wings to catch the force of the blowing gusts.

“These are sea-ships of the Europeans. And see this:”

Miradel showed him a place she called Flanders. A hundred men were mounted on a rank of the pawing, prancing animals Natac had learned were called horses. The great beasts looked terribly fierce, with flaring nostrils and wide, flashing eyes. The men wore shirts of metal, and bore long spears, weapons that were dropped to point forward as the company, in unison, charged. Standing against the riders were hundreds of metal-wearing footmen, and these turned to run as the horses bore down. Natac was appalled by the slaughter as the lancers rode through the broken ranks of the fleeing enemy.

And then there was a line of pathetically feeble-looking men, standing in a row and bearing long, narrow sticks that lacked even the pointed tip of a spear. Nevertheless, these men pointed their weapons at the riders-and then the weapons, in unison, spat a long billow of dark smoke. The attack reached farther than the smoke, dropping a half dozen riders from their saddles, and then the cavalry broke away.

“How… how can an army stand up to warriors like that?” Natac asked. “To those riders, and to sticks that spew fire and death?”

“No army on Earth is capable,” Miradel said. “Though you should know that the different tribes of Europeans expend most of their energy battling each other. Still, they have good ships now, and thriving populations… Already, just twenty years ago, one of their boldest sailors returned from a crossing of the ocean to report the existence of hitherto unknown lands-including the place of your own homeland. The final tie in doom’s knot is this: Europeans have a passion for gold above all things, and nowhere else in the world is gold concentrated as it is in the city of the Aztecs.”

Next Miradel showed him other facets of life on Earth. He saw small churches and great cathedrals, a multitude of temples, minarets that were narrow spires jutting as high as a great pyramid, and shrines decorated with the rounded image of a plump, boyish god. There were other pyramids too, massive structures of stone that the druid stated were tombs for dead leaders, beings now exalted to godhood. And everywhere Natac saw people of different shapes and sizes, with skin colors ranging from pale to charcoal-black. He found himself looking at Miradel, at the high cheekbones and deep lines of her face outlined in the glow of the magical candlelight.

“Are you a human, too… from Earth?” he asked.

“Yes.”

“From which part?”

She moved the picture back across the great ocean, but instead of the mountainous country of Mexico and Tlaxcala, she turned the picture south, toward a region of dense forests and flat, endless ground.