Free Stealing Sacred Fire by Storm Constantine Page A

violence. What had happened to the people who had once
lived there, the noble race of his ancestors? The invaders who’d
raided the land after his people had been forced to flee had made
it wholly their own, permeated it with their repressive creeds,
destroyed and buried the knowledge of the Elders, the race who had
existed even before the Anannage. He burned with a cold fury. It
was all so wrong. The knowledge of the Elders belonged to the
world. He had died for that belief, once.
    While the lands of his
ancestors were torn by cruelty and intolerance, there could be no
evolution in the world. But how could he end it? He had been shown
the possibility of ultimate power in the underworld of Cornwall,
but that stage of his work was over. He had been a conductor for
the force, a catalyst, but he did not feel as if any shred of it
remained inside him.
    Before he could continue his
stroll, weighed down with melancholy, Shem’s attention was
attracted to an image on the screens. He did not want to see any
more violence, yet could not tear his eyes away. A struggling melee
was being shown; a mass of bodies. All was confusion, yet in its
midst stood a lone, motionless figure. This person was taller than
those around him or her. Their face was concealed by a dark red
scarf, only the eyes showed through, but they stared straight into
the camera; challenging, fearless, alive.
    Shem shivered in the clammy
heat of the city. It felt as if the picture had crossed time as
well as distance to reach him. ‘Come,’ the eyes seemed to say. ‘We
are waiting.’ He put one hand flat against the window; it felt
greasy and hot beneath his palm. Were his eyes blurring or had the
image on the screens gone out of focus? He blinked, and the noise
of the demonstration crashed through the glass to fill his ears
with its clamour. He staggered backwards, and bodies thrust against
him, rough hands pushing him away, further into the midst of the
crowd. At first, he thought he had somehow been propelled into the
image on the screens, transported across oceans and many lands to
the country of his ancestors. Then, he glimpsed shop fronts through
the crowd, and realised he was still on Oxford Street, but
inexplicably caught up in a marching throng. Voices called out
furious slogans, but he could not understand them. What were they
protesting about? He saw many dark-skinned people, a few wearing
Middle-Eastern head-gear. Had the demonstration been brought to him
rather than the other way around?
    Shem clawed and struggled his
way to the edge of the crowd. Sightseers and shoppers had vanished,
probably having sought sanctuary behind the doors of shops. Shem
grabbed hold of the arm of an olive-skinned girl. She turned hot,
brown eyes upon him; impatient and afire, and spoke to him sharply
in a tongue he could not fathom.
    ‘What’s this all about?’ Shem
asked her.
    For a moment, he thought she
would pull away from him. Her lips curled into a contemptuous
sneer. Then, some kind of political zeal got the better of her.
‘Yarasadi!’ she snapped.
    Shem looked at her blankly. It
meant nothing. ‘I’ve been away a long time. Tell me.’
    ‘My people are being murdered!’
the girl cried. ‘And your politicians look on, fearful and
ignorant. We mean nothing to them, but our voices are loud!’
    ‘Yarasadi? Where? Middle
East?’
    She nodded, then smiled coldly.
‘Yes. You have been away a long time! Don’t you watch the
news?’
    Shem shook his head. ‘Who are
your people?’
    ‘We are an ancient race, and
our lands have been plundered. Now, we raise our voices in protest.
Now, we are not afraid to fight! It is not too late.’ It sounded
like lines from a manifesto, learned by heart.
    Shem thought the girl seemed
almost crazed. She was probably nothing more than a foreign
student, far removed from her roots, who was caught up in the
political enthusiasms of the young, yet something about her eyes,
her proud stance, touched his soul. He saw echoes of