Triskellion by Will Peterson Read Free Book Online Page B

want to see some?” The man’s face split into a fearsome grin and he nodded at Adam. Adam nodded back.
    The man thrust out a grubby hand. “Jacob Honeyman.Beekeeper. How do you do?”
    Adam shook the man’s hand. “I’m Adam. We’re staying up at Root Cottage with our grand—”
    “Roots?” Honeyman barked. “You’re
Roots
?”
    “We’re Newmans, actually,” Rachel said. “Root is our mother’s maiden name.”
    Honeyman slowly looked from Rachel to Adam, and then grinned, treating them to a fine view of his gums and irregular teeth. “Once a Root, always a Root,” he said. The grin vanished from his face as quickly as it had appeared, then he turned abruptly and began marching away.
    “Come on then, off we go…”
    Before Rachel could make excuses about returning for lunch, her brother was off, following closely behind Jacob Honeyman, whose black coat flapped behind him as he marched away across the moor.
    “There’s a few really old ones in here,” Honeyman said, placing a couple of flat wooden trays on the battered wooden table.
    They had followed the strange man back across the moor to his house. At least, “house” was what he called it. To Rachel and Adam it looked more like a corrugated tin hut with tacked-on additions and windows that had belonged originally to several other buildings.
    Honeyman lifted the cover, revealing that the trays were divided into small compartments, each containing a coin anda tiny label, handwritten in a microscopic, spidery script.
    “Can I?” Adam reached out to the box and Honeyman nodded his permission. Adam picked up a small, irregular nugget of brown metal, which, on close inspection, was stamped with a dog-like animal on one side, and a star on the other.
    “An Ecgbehrt penny. About AD 802, 810, something like that.” Honeyman gave a self-satisfied smile, delighted at being able to air his knowledge. Adam picked up another. This one was larger and stamped with a monster or dragon. “Burgred,” Honeyman said with certainty, naming another Saxon king. “Somewhere around about 852.”
    Rachel picked another coin out from the tray. It was silvery and more sophisticated than the Saxon ones they had been looking at. Honeyman took it from her.
    “Roman,” he said. “Probably one of the first struck in Britain. This one’s a few years BC.” He held the coin up between his thumb and forefinger, raised it to the light. The head of a Roman emperor was clearly visible, garlanded with laurel leaves. Honeyman turned the coin in his fingers. On the other side was a familiar shape.
    “It’s the Tri-… whatever-you-call-it,” Adam said.
    Honeyman nodded. “Triskellion,” he said. “That’s right.”
    Rachel and Adam stared, astonished: people had been reproducing this image for over two thousand years.
    “Surely these things belong in a museum?” Rachel said. She couldn’t believe that Jacob Honeyman possessed such a personal treasure trove.
    “Thing is, what you lot don’t understand, this whole country is many thousands of years old. People have dropped coins everywhere, museums are full of ‘em. So many they can’t even catalogue the flippin’ things. They wouldn’t give these room space. The important thing about these coins is that they’re here. Buried by the circle.”
    “So why is this Triskellion so important?”
    Honeyman chuckled at Adam’s question. “Do you really want to know?”
    Adam did.
    With the help of diagrams and sheets photocopied from library books, Honeyman explained, as Granny Root had, that the origin of the shape was Celtic and that it was formed by three circles that intersected each other. He told them that the circles represented the trinity of female goddesses – the virgin, the mother and the old woman – worshipped by pagans, long before the time of Christianity or any other major religion. “And the circle that binds the three-bladed shape of the Triskellion,” Honeyman said, “represents the circle of