The Three Lights - chapter 1

This is just a bit of whimsy to give my three remaining brain cells a bit of exercise (been under the weather lately and lacking creativity). I like the idea of a serialised story, so here is the first entry in a highly derivative YA fantasy, praise be to St Plagiarus. Not sure how much further, or how regularly, I will continue this but at least it has kickstarted the grey matter once again.

CHAPTER 1

 

 Catriona stood before the stone doorway, her fingers traced the triquetra carved into the ancient wooden door. It looked early medieval, ancient in a city where every other building seemed steeped in centuries. The carved symbol matched that on the letterhead that she had received back in March inviting her to study Celtic History at Gorsedd College, Cambridge. Catriona had applied to study in Cambridge, but at Peterhouse not at this college. She hadn’t even heard of Gorsedd College much less applied to it, but the offer was excellent and especially sweet with the bursary they offered. The prospectus covered not just the historical eras that fascinated her but a great deal else which she had not realised could be studied at degree level. It was practically like getting a degree for free with the bursary, which was not to be sniffed at in today’s economic climate. She groaned inwardly, realising that she was sounding exactly like her own mother. Years of trying to distance herself from her parents and here she was, not even nineteen, and already turning onto them!

She pushed her long brown hair out of her green eyes and wondered what to do. There was no brass nameplate nor any kind of identification that this was the place she wanted. Still, this was Sickle Crescent and the hand drawn map enclosed with the letter had shown it as being between a bookshop and an Indian restaurant exactly as this door was. She thought about nipping in to the bookshop to doublecheck the location.

”Trying to get in?” Catriona was startled from her reverie by the appearance of a short, slim lad of roughly her own age with short-cropped blonde hair. His large brown eyes took her in for some moments before he repeated the question. She registered a North Welsh accent and noted the rather old-fashioned style of dress with the collarless shirt and matching dark velvet trousers and waistcoat, reminiscent of something her great-grandfather might have worn in his youth. Her parents had joked about what mad fashions she might start adopting once she became a student. Dad was convinced she would get rainbow hair and end up waving placards on every mad protest that came along. Not that she’d ever had the slightest interest in politics.

“You could try speaking friend and entering, but I doubt it would do you any good!” the second voice came from her right and Catriona looked up into the bright blue eyes of a fiery-haired youth with the build of a rugby prop forward. “That was a joke, by the way. I’m Kye, reading Bardic Arts. What are you here for?”

Catriona gave her particulars and the Welsh youth introduced himself as Dylan. As he spoke, he placed a hand over the carved symbol and then rapped on it three times. To Catriona’s surprise, the door swung open to reveal a flagged passageway leading to a college green with assorted students wandering about laden with bags, books, backpacks and all the usual encumberments needed for the start of the academic year. Dylan’s fashion sense seemed to be shared by most of the people wandering about or lounging under trees. If anything, Dylan might seem a bit modern by comparison. The three of them stepped through and took in the sight of the campus. A massive stone tower covered in a hundred windows of varying sizes and shapes, as archaic in style as the entryway, rose up so high that Catriona wondered how she had not seen it on the walk up from the train station. Two large buildings stood to either side, separated by walkways and flower beds. The buildings were identical in shape and scale except for the hue of the stone from which they were built, one was tinted green and almost covered in ivy whilst the other had a blueish hue and a stream running alongside it almost like a moat. This building had ornate knotwork designs carved into the stones around the windows and doors, possibly the other building did too but the ivy obscured it.

“The third House is at the back of the Tower, you cannot see it from here,” Kye gestured vaguely and returned the waves of several passing students whom he obviously knew.

“Have you two been here before?” It struck Catriona that her two fellow students seemed quite unphased by the oddity of this place which seemed to almost be hidden away from the rest of Cambridge. She reached into her coat to fish out her phone ready to take a few pictures when she noted that none of the other students were using devices. As curious as these buildings looked, the idea of fifty or so teenagers being able to go five minutes without staring at a screen was even stranger still.

“There’s no point getting your phone out, the granite blocks the signal. There’s no Wi-Fi anywhere here. I’ve been here a few times to visit my sisters when they graduated. They were in Ty’r Awyr, that’s where I’m applying to as well. Dylan has the look of a Ty’r Môr about him. What about you, Cat?”

“I’ve been to Edinburgh loads of times, I can assure you granite does nothing to mobile signals! I don’t understand what half those words mean either.”. She was going to point out that only her friends were allowed to call her Cat but thought that perhaps these two might become her first university friends. They seemed pleasant enough and being on good terms with people who knew their way round would help in the first week or two.

The two lads exchanged glances before Dylan asked if she was the first in her family to attend Gorsedd. She confirmed that was indeed the case.

“Gorsedd is actually composed of three colleges, you see. Most of my family have graduated from Ty’r Môr, that’s the House of the Sea in English. Kye’s pack have all been in Ty’r Awyr which is behind the Tower.”

“House of the Sky, to you. It’s where all the best storytellers and bards graduate from,” the burly youth declaimed.

“Then there’s the one with all the ivy, the Ty’r Tir.” Dylan added. Catriona’s gaze automatically moved to the building in question and registered three people in a second-floor window watching them, an elderly woman, a portly man, and tall man with a heavy black beard. She wondered if they were lecturers.

“The House of the… Land, would that be?” Dylan smiled approval at her translation, adding that one of his uncle’s had gone there. “I went on holiday to Pembrokeshire once, picked up a few words – mostly from street signs. I’m nae having a dig at the Welsh or anything, but why isn’t a Cambridge college using English?”

“Half of them use Latin for their inscriptions!” Kye shifted his hefty backpack off and dropped it on the flagstones. “When this place was founded, English wasn’t spoken in this part of the world. It’s a lot older than it looks. Not that it looks exactly modern, but you know what I mean!”

Catriona studied the buildings in more depth and realised that she couldn’t place the architecture in any particular era. The central tower reached up for ten or so floors and had been draped with bunting and flags – maybe to mark Freshers Week. Set above wide wooden doors and flanked by stone carved dragons was a painted rendition of the three-cornered knotwork she had seen earlier. This version had added details, with the outer three sections each featuring a stylised animal and the central portion showing a smiling sun-face.

“The seal is for Ty’r Môr, the owl for Ty’r Awyr, and the wolf for Ty’r Tir. That triquetra hangs in practically every classroom and in the common rooms. The motto underneath means ‘three children of one mother’, which I guess is fairly self-explanatory.” Catriona couldn’t help but think that Dylan had beautiful eyes and blushed a little at the thought. Maybe it was a bit too soon to start getting weak-kneed over random boys. There was too much else to be getting to grips with.

Kye led them to a circular bench that was built around an impressively large oak tree, reassuring Catriona that they did not need to rush to reception to enrol. The students just needed to wait until a bell tolled to summons them to the Great Hall on the first floor of the Tower.

“Kye!” They all looked up to see a short young woman with flame-red hair rushing out of the main door of the Tower and heading towards them. She wore a very peculiar outfit that put Catriona in mind of a monk’s habit, pale yellow with knotwork embroidered down the hems.

“Hello sis, you settled in already?” He gave his sister a bear hug and then introduced her to the others. “Morwenna is in the second year. They all got here last week to get everything ready for us Freshers.”

“Are you related to Gethin Elton that graduated last year?” Morwenna posed the question to Dylan, who confirmed that they were cousins. “There are almost as many Elton’s on the alumni rolls as there are Pennrudh’s. What was your name again?”

“Catriona Adair.”

“Adair…Adair? I think there was an Adair here back in the early 1800s”

“My sister is obsessed with genealogy!”

“It’s a passion, but hardly an obsession. You’ll have to excuse my little brother, he exaggerates everything. Adair could be related to the word for oak tree. Do you know much about your family tree, Catriona?”

She had to admit that a few messy divorces and family rifts had made it difficult to know a great deal beyond the most recent generations. “My grandparents came from Galloway but moved to Glasgow for work. Funny you should mention oak trees because my mother still has an embroidered panel my granny made. It’s a Gaelic phrase with oak leaves in each corner. Never occurred to me to wonder about the leaves.”

“Look, if you’re an absolute newbie here then you won’t have been up the Tower,” Dylan added that he’d never been allowed up the Tower either. “The bell won’t go off for another half-hour, why don’t I take you all up the tower and on to the viewing gallery? Professor Mactire always says it’s best to start with an overview of what you need to understand.”

The ground floor of the Tower was more akin to one of the Scottish baronial halls she’d been taken to on school trips than any academic institution she had ever visited. Antlers adorned the three convex walls which formed a triangular shape. Alongside the antlers numerous paintings in heavy gilt frames. Some were portraits of strangely dressed people whom she assumed might either be successful alumni or possibly old lecturers of merit. Other pictures depicted landscapes and yet others contained mythological scenes of dragons, sea monsters, ogres, and suchlike creatures. There seemed to be neither rhyme nor reason to the scattering of artworks. A reception desk was flanked by three impressively large statues that stopped Catriona in her tracks whilst the other three headed for the lift. One statue was of a man with the head and paws of a wolf, another was a man with outstretched wings and the head of a bird, while the third was halfway between a woman and a seal. Morwenna called her back to the task at hand as the doors of an ancient-looking lift creaked open and she hurried across to join her new friends. She dumped her suitcase and bags in the same heap next to the lift doors as Dylan and Kye had left theirs.

The ride up to the gallery was punctuated by so many groans, creaks, clunks, and peculiar noises that Catriona felt sure the lift would break down or, worse yet, plummet them all to an untimely death, at any second. Thankfully it finally ground to a halt and the doors opened to show several glass doors through which the late September sun streamed. Morwenna lead then through one of the doors and on to the open-air gallery that continued round all three sides of the Tower.

Catriona had never suffered vertigo, but felt she might start at any minute as she stared down on the roofs of the three college buildings. Gorsedd was clearly on board with the greening projects that so many cities around the world were trying to take up. Each roof was covered in plants – one even had a pond that was deep enough for someone to be swimming in. Whoever it was had spotted them staring down and waved. Kye enthusiastically waved back and called out encouragement, but his voice was probably whipped away by the wind.

Each of the buildings was an elongated triangle, reminding her of leaves or petals radiating out from the Tower. It suddenly dawned on her that the layout of the four buildings within circular grounds matched the triquetra which was displayed in so many places. As one penny dropped, so did another and this led to rather perturbing ripples. She had been so fascinated by the colleges that she had paid no attention to the rest of Cambridge. All the landmarks were there, but the layout was different from map of the city which she had studied after receiving the letter about enrolment. She had been confused then by her inability to find the college or even Sickle Crescent on which it was located. There was definitely no circular arrangement like the Gorsedd on the map.

“Why isn’t any of this on the map? How comes I couldn’t see this Tower when I was approaching the Crescent? It so damned big I’m surprised it can’t be seen from miles around.” she murmured, not realising anyone was close enough to hear.

“The Arch Druid won’t permit anyone to map it or see it,” Morwenna answered, “the Tower is cloaked in mist to make sure we stay on this side of the Veil. Anyway, the bell will be tolling soon. You lot need to get ready for the ceremony.”

TBC.......