The Royal Stones of Eden (Royal Secrecies Book 1) (15 page)

The only time that the Knights killed purposely was in extreme cases. For example, the Knights considered someone a threat if a rogue Knight or any Guardian used the stones for any other purpose other than to ensure the survival of the stones or the members. These perceived threats were often victims of a Knight’s holy justice in mystical and myriad ways throughout time. However, this was an exception to the rule.

Around the 5th or 6th century, in England, a few hundred years after the death of Joseph Habib, a visitor arrived in England and presented a solution to the problem of the shortened lives of the Guardians. At first, he was a mild-mannered visitor that seemed genteel, and he befriended the leader of the Knights. That leader was the great and legendary King Arthur Pendragon.

The visitor’s name was Medraut. He was a tall and dark man, and he claimed to be a refugee of a holy war in Babylonia. He appealed to the Knights and their pity and sympathies in such a way that he was eventually pronounced a Knight by King Arthur.

However, the story did not end there. Medraut befriended a Knight called Joseph Habib III, the grandson of Joseph Habib. Joseph was later renamed Joseph Habib Khidr by King Arthur. He had an unusually long life for that time, but some discovered his secret. Joseph Habib Khidr’s longer life was due to a forbidden practice of using ancient sardius stones in drinking water.

In addition to giving the practitioner a longer life, provided by drinking water stirred with the ancient sardius stones, the stones also proved that they had the potential to take away that very same life. Initially, drinking the sardius water brought a total healing to the body, but later the practice eventually introduced many diseases as a surprising aftereffect.

Healing was always the very first and most deceptive effect. It provided a constant source of health to both the body and the mind. However, it also shortened the life by the diseases it introduced into the body. As I have said, instead of living a 500 or 600-year life, the partakers lived to a typical age of about one to two hundred years. They would be in perfect health until a fatal, final, and sudden collapse. Some were more fortunate than others were, and they survived up to 300 years, but never more than that.

It was King Arthur who found out about the forbidden practice through his sorcerer and chief advisor, who was named Merlin. Merlin suggested that deeper and unknown problems might arise from using the sardius stones in drinking water—problems more concerning than a shortened life. Merlin was concerned about uncontrollable plagues that could wipe out entire cities if not controlled.

Now, the Knights had always wished to live a long life, and that was one of their stated purposes. However, they never intended to bring additional diseases into the world. That was not an acceptable consequence. Therefore, King Arthur’s father, Uther, a well-known Guardian, made the practice a forbidden one because of the suspected danger. Up to that point, it was common for many to drink the sardius stone water. Moreover, the practice had been approved for use for thousands of years, until the first disease was introduced.

King Arthur reissued his father’s edict and forbade Habib and Medraut from using the sardius stones to lengthen the life, but only one of them complied. Habib obeyed the king, but Medraut continued the practice and art of drinking the sardius water. Furthermore, Medraut convinced the wife of King Arthur, Guinevere, to use additional and equally unethical means to lengthen the lives of the Knights. It was the method and practice of witchcraft.

Medraut was a stranger—he was never one of us—but he was crafty. He did not share his secret purposes with us. Although it appeared at times that Medraut sought to ensure the survival of the Guardians, he also played on the fear of the people.

The biggest fear of the Knights was to lose their lives at an early age, which, as stated before, was of an age of fewer than 300 years. By their vanity, conceit, and pride, Medraut and Guinevere were tempted, and they sought abnormal means to achieve their goals. They practiced the unnatural and black art of ancient witchcraft. They used spells, various ancient incantations, and even the sacred ancient stones in their vile use of the illegal magic.

Transference by using certain stone elements was allowed by the leader of the Guardians, but only in times of an emergency. A ruling body of appointed men called Elders always had to agree with the decision. They were the governing body from the very beginning, although I have not mentioned it until now. The stones were never meant, as previously stated, for personal gain or enjoyment. Yes, there were times that traveling to another place or time was permitted, but only during those times of crises.

One reason that the displacement or transference was severely discouraged was the effect that it had on the ones that traveled through time or space, away from an impending danger. Often, time travel produced severe memory loss as a side effect, frequently lasting for a span of about thirty to fifty years after the time travel was completed.

Medraut had a solution to this memory block. Medraut’s solution sought to keep and maintain memories during the entire process of transference. So Medraut went to and convinced Queen Guinevere that one could travel through time and space through soul transference instead of literal body displacement. He argued that a Guardian’s life could be further lengthened by taking over another body entirely and completely, and with memory retention. Medraut’s theory was only sound from a mathematical point of view. If a single body could live up to 300 years in perfect health, then two bodies, he argued, could live a combined 600 years. One could easily see the moral problem with this, but Medraut did not see this at all.

Medraut enlisted and compelled assistants to test his theories of transference, but the initial results were negative and not productive. First, he discovered that transference from one live body into another live body was strictly impossible. Medraut conjectured that the Living Spirit had set up a law that prevented two living souls from sharing the same body. Then Medraut attempted the transference from a live body to a dead body through his black magic and the use of two stones of blue and white. This process failed as well. In fact, it left the assistants that attempted it in a permanent state of insanity. The final attempt was even more dangerous and more immoral than the first two efforts. Medraut imagined the possibility of a soul or spirit in a dying body, at the very moment of death, transferring into the dying body of another.

By that time, however, the Queen had changed her mind about using the magic. She planned to stop Medraut. Guinevere, up to this point, had learned the black magic along with Medraut and was in full agreement with his plans. She wanted, despite Arthur’s objections, to help lengthen the lives of all the Guardians, at all costs, even by breaking moral laws to achieve it. However, she did not believe in murdering someone or committing suicide to achieve this goal.

Medraut needed a dying body for this next experiment, but he dared not risk the ruining of his experiment by a betraying witch. With a great resolution, he formed a plan to kidnap Guinevere, and to silence her betrayal forever.

The ceremony was secretive, aggressive, and swift in the forest, one fateful night. Amidst an oncoming fog with torches around a circle, a murder was planned and committed. Medraut forced Queen Guinevere to be the assistant that night. He drugged her and tied her naked body to a stone table on a chilly evening, in the autumn season. As the pricks of goose bumps stood out on her white, royal flesh, Medraut sharpened his knife.

Several hours before the ceremony, King Arthur’s sorcerer, who practiced only healing magic, sent an urgent message to the king. The magician Merlin had used a ball of crystal that forecasted doom for Guinevere at midnight. The King quickly alerted and gathered his soldiers, and a march toward the forest commenced. However, he was too late.

Just before the King’s arrival, Guinevere’s vivacious breasts were pierced with two thrusts of a knife made toward her heart by Medraut. Blood gushed over the stone table and dribbled to the ground, and Guinevere’s eyes stared through the fog patches toward the stars in the heavens.

Medraut tied another unwilling and unfortunate assistant to a nearby stake in the ground. It was a chosen and young female who had a similar body frame to Guinevere’s lovely one. She screamed as Medraut tore her clothes, her skin exposed to the night and the moist ground. With brutal forcefulness, the bloody knife plunged into the poor girl as the screams of the two women quickened the pace of Arthur’s horses.

Mysterious and unknown words came out of Medraut while he had his knife up to the night sky with both hands upraised. King Arthur and his Knights, or Guardians, arrived on the scene with looks of horror on their faces. Joseph Habib Khidr was there also with a most sorrowful look upon his face. Merlin was there on another horse, and he too looked at the scene of the great tragedy. The King, Merlin, and Joseph drew close to the scene while the other Guardians remained at a greater distance away from them. The others stayed behind to prevent an action of retreat, to surround Medraut.

Then something happened that changed things from that moment on in the world of the Knights. Medraut’s eyes began to glow an intense reddish color. He held onto some stones that he had picked up off the ground just a moment before. He plunged his murderous knife into his own heart. Immediately, there was an expanding ring of white that left his body and expanded to include all of the company of the Guardians and their horses. The circle grew outward and increased its size to several acres until it disappeared in a few moments, in a glow of golden color.

When the cloud of white expanded, it put everyone within it into a brief period of sleep. When the Guardians awoke, King Arthur was there, along with Merlin and Joseph Habib Khidr, but all of the other Guardians that were at a further distance away from the ritual were missing. Also missing were the stone table, the stake, and the bound women. They were all gone, all of the horses too. There was no sign of Medraut either. The grass seemed to be a foot taller, and the air was much warmer, hinting of a summer night. Everyone was very much in a state of confusion, and no one had any recollection of the night before, or for that matter, of who they were and what they were doing there. Somehow, they had lost their memories and their identity. All but one that is—but he kept his silence!

They heard the sound of a horse trampling in the distance, and it made all of the men direct their curious and muddled heads toward it. A rider, dressed in an unadorned tunic, leggings, and knee-high boots trotted toward them. He rode confidently and with intense purpose, and he stopped a few feet before them. He stroked his goatee with a whisk of his hand before he spoke.

“Good day to you, gentlemen!”—the man failed to dismount before them but heralded them atop his horse.

“You will come, and I will take you to the King!” he declared.

“Who are you, good sir?”—King Arthur, a confused spirit, set the question.

As he spoke, there arrived more men in similar attire, and they had with them several unmanned horses ready for their mounting. They seemed to come from all sides as if to threaten an ambush if not obeyed. The nearby canvas of bushes seemed to release the men and horses from their hiding spots.

“My name is Robin, Robin of Locksley! You will follow me! Your horses are here now!” Robin cried out.

Chapter 11

The Revelation of John

Sam got past the guard at the gate because they were old acquaintances. Then he parked his car in front of a shabby but locked garage because the usual front door approach did not work. He peeked inside the front windows of the old house, but he found no signs of life inside.

Sam knocked on the front door again. He rang the doorbell three times. Again, there was no answer. He had just returned from the coffee shop in Monterey, and he was tired of standing and waiting for an answer.

He called out, “Peter! Tom! Is anybody home?” He thought that Peter and Mattie would be home by now. He was puzzled that Tom, an old friend of his, wasn’t there either.

He went to the backside of the house to inspect the deck area. Maybe they were in the back, he thought. The solid redwood deck spoke of its stability, firmness, and reliability. It comforted one with the feel of Old California. The ground was uneven, and his limp and cane were seldom a replacement for the required sure-footedness that was needed to navigate the yard. He stumbled once or twice before he made it successfully to the deck behind the house. He climbed the old timbered steps to the rear glass door.

Once on the back deck, he saw clearly through the sliding glass door and into the simple and unadorned front living room of the house.

“Some security this is!”—Sam shook his head with astonishment. Then he took off his sunglasses and pocketed them in his shirt.

Sam spotted a lounge chair that was inviting but stained with mildew. After a few useless brushes of the seat with his rough hand, he sat down, and the aged fabric on it struggled to hold his weight.

While Sam was on the deck, the earlier spotter found his victim again. He was on a nearby hill and within range. He found a hiding place for his BMW, and he prepared to take out Sam. The slender and pale man took out a suitcase from his trunk, and then he proceeded to take out metal parts that screwed together to form a tripod. He pulled out a small scope in his sports jacket, and he aimed it at his object. His target was the man in a lounge chair on a redwood deck.