I said nothing, my concentration apparently on the road as I pulled out of the car park, but I was listening intently. Ollie’s prattle was something of a stream of consciousness, but he was the first person togetthere was something special about this place, and I wanted to hear what he thought it was.
“Like, they’re witnesses to history. Hey, do you think maybe that’stheir purpose? But how would it work if we don’t know how to access what they’ve witnessed?” He moved restlessly,his hands flying as he tried to explain himself. “But maybe that doesn’t matter. Maybe it’s not aboutus.Maybe they’re not collecting the information for us, but just because information’s valuable in itself. Maybe when we’ve all died out, dragons and humans, they’ll still exist, witnesses that we were once here. And that’s kind of depressing, thinking about the end of the world.”
I moistened my lips. I wasn’t nervous. I didn’tgetnervous. But this was a conversation I’d never been able to have with anyone else. “Do you have the feeling you’ve been here before?”
“Oh my God,yes!” He turned in his seat, blue eyes bright in my peripheral vision. “That’s what I felt as soon as I was in the air, but I didn’t realise it till you said it. Iknowthis place. Do you think dragons created it? Is it buried in our collective consciousness?”
I shrugged. I had no more idea than he had. I simply knew that there was something here, and I couldn’t quite believe that the first person who understood it, whofeltit the way I did, was the ubiquitous, talkative, and unfairly attractive Ollie Shaw.
“What do you think happened to the missing stones? I mean, they’re so big, it must have been dragons who took them, mustn’t it? Maybe some dragons somewhere have a small henge in their back garden. That would beawesome.”
“Locals probably broke them up to use for building work,” I told him.
He deflated, and I felt momentarily bad for doing that to him.
“Or maybe there’s a henge somewhere no one knows about,” I added before I could stop myself.
“That’s what I think happened. That’s whatI’ddo, if not for the fact I’d be taking them away from their friends.” He paused for an instant. “Not their friends. That sounds stupid. But they should be together.”
He wasn’t wrong. I pulled off the road into the hotel car park, and he sat up straight, looking around as if surprised our journey back had taken exactly the same amount of time as our journey there.
“That was so awesome,” he said. “Thank you for taking me.”
He promptly blushed bright red, and I had the feeling his mind had gone precisely where mine had. Which was Ollie Shaw stretched out naked and wanton on my bed, begging me to take him.
“Bye,” he squeaked, and all but fell out of my car before running for the hotel. I was left locking the car and wondering how the hell he’d got me thinking of him naked when, these days, monks got more action than me.
It didn’t matter. Once the moot was finished, I’d never have to see him again.
* * *
The morning session was a waste of time. Everyone had an opinion about the suggestion of closer integration, and everyone intended to be heard about it. Once I realised this was going to be nothing more than a prolonged shouting match, I slouched in my chair and let my mind wander back to Avebury. To the mysterious power of those stones and the way Ollie Shaw’s face had looked in the rising sun…
I jerked fully awake, rubbing my hands over my face. Margaret gave me a sideways glance and offered me a mint.
“Believe it or not, they’re still going,” she murmured.
“Which way are the majority leaning?” I asked. It was more polite than enquiring why my mint tasted of fish.
“I think most are in favour of at least trying, but the loudest ones are against, so Abimelech’s letting them shout themselves out. That way, no one can say they didn’t get their fair say.”
The clock on the wall showed at least another hour to go, and I picked up my pen to doodle on the notepaper. After a few dragons and birds had taken shape, my pen began to sketch something else out, something with curves and a pattern that felt predetermined.
Ten minutes later, I was looking at a sketch of a spherical intersection of rings, clustered around a globe in the centre. It looked abstract, but I’d felt it as I drew—it was the stones of Avebury, leading to and protecting a dragon’s eye.
I itched to go home so I could create this and feel it taking shape in three dimensions, but this damnable meeting was still dragging on.
“You haven’t had much to say,” Margaret observed, leaning over to look at what I’d been working on.
“Not yet.” Not while the Mancunian and Liverpudlian families were going at each other hammer and tongs.
When my turn came to speak, I still didn’t have much to say. There were reasons I didn’t want strange dragons in my territory, observing my family, spotting the fault lines and the weaknesses. Yet at the same time, the idea of mixing more readily made sense.
“I vote aye to better integration, but I do not agree to having a strange dragon foisted on me when I leave here.”
Margaret’s loud crunching of her mint sounded as if she disapproved of my sensible decision not to take a stranger home with me so they could discover the fundamental weakness in my family. I tipped my head to her in apology. I liked her, but I hated that part of her idea.
Mortimer eventually drew the meeting to a close and told us we would reassemble for a final vote on both matters after lunch.
