Set in Stone

Set in Stone

by Hannah M. Dewies ~ 1.900 words

One does not, of course, choose to be looked at. One simply is looked at, in the way a portrait is looked at, or a particularly old dog. The hands come in their thousands now — soft, warm, faintly oiled — and they touch what they were expressly told not to touch, and they say things like "oh my god, Brent, I'm literally touching history," and I rather wish the rope were electrified.

The barriers help. Not enough, but they do help. At least with the proper ones. I understand the warm ones pay for the privilege of leaving fingerprints upon my flank, which is at least a kind of tribute, though it does seem an odd arrangement: the privilege flowing the wrong direction entirely. Still. One is a stone. One does not complain. Out loud, at least. But one notices, at considerable length, and across the geological epochs one has at one's disposal.

The current civilisation calls itself a civilisation, which is touching. They have not yet worked out their energy system — still burning things, the dears, like cavemen with better marketing — but they have invented a kind of glass rectangle they hold in front of their faces, and into this rectangle they speak as though the rectangle were listening. I have watched this for approximately two human generations now, and I continue to find it charming. The way one finds a kitten charming, when it attacks its own reflection.

I was, of course, here before the ice wall. My cousin — who is now a cornerstone of a rather lovely castle on the Norman coast, splendid view, I'm told, and blessedly fewer hands — used to lie three valleys north and cracked rather dramatically when the glaciers retreated. We do not speak of it. We simply noted that it happened. Geology, like marriage, is a long arrangement during which one is occasionally rearranged, and the dignified response is to carry on standing.

Or lying down. Like my other cousin, who managed to flatten half a Viking war-band in a single afternoon and has been reclining ever since, his career complete. The recent scientists call him the Slaughter Stone. Generous of them, considering they have no idea what occurred. He simply fell at exactly the right moment, in exactly the right direction, and a great many improperly washed gentlemen with axes had a very bad day. I admit the spectacle was quite entertaining, and one cannot, of course, ignore the consequences. That afternoon installed two of the more durable dogmas of the current civilisation: fate and karma. Charming ideas.

Not especially useful — but: whatever cracks your rock.

I myself was always more entertained by the real stuff. Not those things that happen in somebody's mind — or, increasingly, do not, if one looks closely at the recent inhabitants.

The good days. The days when real things happened. Merlin and Morgana — yes, those Merlin and Morgana, and the recent story about them is as wrong as a story can possibly get — had the best fights.

Efficient, decisive, and vastly more interesting than anything currently passing for conflict. Sparks, you understand. With all the dressings: thunderstorms, the air opening in ways the current civilisation still hasn’t quite grasped, the smell of ozone lingering for a fortnight, portals, the lot.

He would summon something, she would unsummon it, and one had the distinct impression that both of them knew exactly what they were doing, which already sets them apart from most of what one sees nowadays. Boy, that was entertainment of the highest order.

In those days we could all dance. The current civilisation has an issue with what they call weight — not only on stones, on people too, I'm told. Which proves my point. Just because they don't understand it, they dismiss every other possibility. Dogma's just a gun somebody else loaded. They carry it around feeling dangerous, and never once ask who pointed it at them first. As that German poet had it: what must not be, cannot be. Commoners. Really. As though the planet were obliged to remember them.

There was, I should mention, one genuinely memorable incident — and I bring it up only because the Altar Stone has not properly spoken to me since, and frankly the silence is louder than the original event. It happened in what the warm ones now call the late Bronze Age, and — for the record — it had nothing to do with the humans currently running about. They have not yet worked out that they don't count. At least until they finally stop throwing those Atom bombs around, which they will eventually overdo, and which will probably end them. It might have negative sides too, I suppose.

But back to the visitors. There are, in fact, a great many of them passing through, all the time, invisible to the warm ones. One really does wonder what the warm ones think they see. That particular afternoon, the energy column rose as it does on the equinox, and one of the visitors was distracted mid-passage by the column, and bounced. Off my eastern face. He missed the portal, and — upsy. There was a colour I had never previously experienced. And afterwards, a great quantity of something green — thin, vegetal, faintly luminous (I watched the pattern change over time, which was fascinating) — all over the Altar Stone. She was scandalised. She has been cool with me ever since, as though we had invited the visitor personally.

Five thousand years of the silent treatment. Over a smudge.

His crew-members, predictably, found the whole business hilarious. One particularly cheeky one couldn't resist lasering "$%& woz here" into my flank (his name is not pronounceable in the current human sound-scale, so "$%&" will have to do). The others followed. But"$%&", naturally, was the one who got fried. And here we go again with recent dogma. No, it was not karma. It was their captain failing to brief them on the energy spikes one is fully capable of exaggerating by emotional outbursts. Well. They never came back. I gather they took up talking to chickens instead, which they found a more rewarding pastime. The Altar Stone, incidentally, is still not speaking to me. Sisters.

What I do find quite adoring nowadays are the scientists. The scientists are adorable. They measure one. They measure one again, having forgotten what one measured the previous decade. They take core samples, which is precisely as charming as it sounds. They have constructed, between them, a really extraordinary edifice of certainty about what one is for, and one would correct them, but one is a stone, and stones do not pass notes. The greatest fun, of course, is watching them try to read the markings the visitors left before the smear. They have entire careers devoted to it. They have published papers.

They believe what they believe with the fervour of people who have never been corrected by anyone who outdated them, which is to say, by anything that was here before the wheel. Only six generations ago their grandfathers held — scientifically, mind you, with charts — that the female brain was constitutionally inferior, that the continents had never moved, and that washing one's hands before surgery was a fad. These positions were defended with the same sober certainty currently deployed to insist that I was built by druids, who arrived approximately two thousand years too late and did, at most, the medieval equivalent of standing near me and looking thoughtful.

Using exactly the same procedure, they are now declaring what this constellation was built for. They believe I was an astronomical observatory, which is partially correct in the way that a cathedral is partially a roof. They believe I was a temple, a calendar, a healing site, a burial ground, a status symbol, and in one particularly enthusiastic year, an acoustic device.

I was, in fact, an agreement.

But agreement is not a category their instruments measure for, and so it does not exist on their charts, and so it did not happen, which is a little like declaring the wind imaginary because one's anemometer is broken. But one is not bitter about this. One is simply patient in the way only a stone can be patient, which is to say, industrially.

But — and here one must be uncharacteristically direct, because the warm ones are,

I suspect, running rather low on time — they have forgotten the important bit.

The ones who raised us asked. That is the part the instruments cannot find. They sang, for one thing. They brought salt, and ochre, and a particular kind of sweet smoke I can still summon if the wind comes off the Avon at exactly the right slant. They apologised for the moving. They explained, in language we understood because language was not yet so cluttered, what we were being moved for, and they made promises, and — this is the part — they kept them. For some centuries. The covenant was honoured. The land was tended. Reciprocity was the architecture, and we were merely its ornament.

The Romans came, and the Romans measured. That was the first rudeness. They did not ask. They counted. I could feel myself becoming a quantity, which is, in stone-terms, a little like being sneezed upon by a stranger at a wedding. After the Romans, the rudeness became fashionable. Each subsequent civilisation has been, in its own dear way, ruder than the last. The medievals at least feared me, which is a kind of relationship.

The Victorians sketched me and stole bits of me, which is at least interest. The current arrangement — the rope, the rectangle, the was-here of it all — is the loneliest I have been since the ice wall went away.

We stones do not, in general, prophesy. We leave that to weather and to bones.

But the warm ones have, I note, developed a rather cultured dogma about the weather change. They use it, primarily, to make more money, which is apparently a thing in their understanding. What a poor existence. The weather changes have come and gone since forever. If they would simply stop throwing their plastic around — or at least take it with them when they finally leave — that would be a change. It still wouldn't fix the weather, because the weather is changing anyway, and their dogma keeps them from seeing the larger picture.

But they have continued, because their dogma — progress, they call it, growth, they call it, the economy, they call it — is a gun somebody else loaded, and they carry it about feeling dangerous, and they have not once asked who pointed it at them in the first place.

When this is over — and it will be over, in the way weather is always over, eventually — the survivors will find their way back to the stones. They always do. They will sit

at our feet, and they will be quiet for the first time in some centuries, and they will ask. And we will answer, as we answered before, because the agreement is older than the forgetting, and stones, unlike civilisations, keep their word.

In the meantime: do please mind the rope. And tell Brent the fingerprints come off in

the rain, but the sentiment is what one rather objects to.

That's… sedimentary.

But probably not set in stone.

Who knows?