Folk said many things of the stones. That giants set them there in the elder world. That Merlin fetched them out of Ireland by art not given to Christian men. That no good thing came of standing among them after sundown.

I was reared within a short walk of them and heard all such talk before I had hair on my lip. My mother would cross herself when we went by. My father spat and said stone was stone, though he knew the flock refused to bed there at night. For my own part, I held my peace.

There are things on God’s earth so ancient that men quit trying to understand them and make stories instead. Stonehenge, as they call it, was such a thing.

Yet I never held with the saying that it was dead.

I had long marked that the place kept its own manner. Frost lay there when the rest of the field was clear. The air within the ring had a waiting quality upon certain nights, especially when the heavens were very bright and clean above the plain. I cannot name it better. Only this: there were times I felt the stones were bent upon some business of their own, and that if I stood among them I was near to it.

I told no man this. Men are merry enough when naming another fool.

I had seen more than forty winters when the true wonder came, and by then I had buried my father, my wife, and one little son, and had learned that the world does not soften for grief. I kept sheep still. I mended hurdles. I bowed my head at Mass and asked no favor save fair weather in lambing time and strength in my hands to do the morrow’s work.

It was in autumn, near to the shutting of the year. The night had no cloud in it. The stars stood hard and thick as salt cast on black cloth. So I went in alone, crook in hand.

Even now I cannot say at what moment the world changed, for nothing leapt or broke. Rather it seemed that some veil was taken away. The space amongst the stones, which I had known all my days, became at once strange. Strange as entering the Kirk at an hour when no priest is there and finding that prayers have been going on without cease since before your birth. I did not hear words. I do not mean that. But I knew, all in one stroke, that the place had not been empty, not ever.

The stars sharpened overhead until it seemed to me they were not far fires but holes pricked through a great dark hide, with the brightness of the sun behind. The old stones lost something of their heaviness and they became as a gate in fog: not chiefly as wood and hinge, but as a thing made for passage.

There came a light into the midst of them. In that light stood figures — I have no better word. They were shaped near enough to men that my eye sought heads and limbs upon them, yet their form shifted like flame. At one glance they were spare and high; at the next they seemed broad as doorposts. I could not tell whether they wore brightness or were made of it.

I fell to my knees, not from virtue but because my strength fled.

Then they set their regard upon me.

It was unlike being looked at by lord, priest, or any living soul, but more akin to standing in winter water: all of me known at once, unable to shelter what I was. They passed through my life as a hand passes through grain. My mother’s face. The ache in my shoulders at shearing. My boy’s small grave. The smell of wet wool. Fear I had known as a child when thunder rolled over the plain.

And with that knowing came another thing: not speech, but time.

They had been here in the world before our reckonings. Before Christ’s birth, before Rome, before old kings whose names survive only in priests’ books and drunkards’ boasts. The stones were no tomb, nor idol-house, nor work of giants. They were made to answer heaven. Long had they stood at their office. Long had they called. Long had no answer come.

Till that night.

Why they should answer to me I cannot tell. Yet I felt their wondering at it. They had looked, I think, for great men: princes, clerks, philosophers, makers of instruments. Instead they found one who knew lambing seasons, murrain signs, and the turn of weather.

What they gave was a tool I could not hold. Shapes of things not yet made by Christian hands. Wheels working without beast or millstream. Devices that could mark the courses of the heavens. Glasses that made far things near. Wings framed by craft that might teach a body to contend with air.

I thought my heart would fail from it.

Then the light thinned. The figures were gone, or beyond my seeing. Dawn came pale over the plain, and the stones were solid again.

I turned and started at the stranger behind me.

A young traveler, foreign by his speech, with ink on his fingers.

He asked what I had seen.

I spoke long. He listened. And marked in a little leather book as I talked. Wheels. Wings. Circles within circles.

After many hours, evening approached again.

“These are great matters,” he said.

“They are no use to me,” I said. “Mayhap they shall be to another.”

He made a grave bow.

“What is your name?” I asked.

He smiled and answered, “Leonardo, son of Ser Piero.”

I watched him till the dark took him. Standing there among the old stones, I thought that perhaps heaven does not cast its gifts upon the mighty first. Perhaps it lets them lie a while in poor hands, until the proper mind comes walking by.