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Part Four - Exercitator
(Magician)


The folk of the land are layers of an onion, whose thin skin is the distant overlordship of the Franks. Beneath it are "Romans" of Latin, Celt, and Ligure blood. At the core of the onion are small, dark people, elusive forest-dwellers, fairies, and Gypsies, who still sip at the breast of Ma. Thus are the people.
The land is sunny. Broad rivers run deep in one season and trickle in others. Mountains stand white and ocher above fertile plain and desolate heath. Vineyards huddle on southern slopes. Elsewhere ancient olive groves shade the rocky ground. For a few months, cold winds from the Alps contend with wet ones from the Mediterranean, and chill rains fall. Then the Mistral, the divine wind, drives men mad.
The land is uncrowded, for there has been much slaughter. The Moors swept through. Charles the Hammer defeated them at Poitiers, and ironically, Christian Charles's hammer fell harder upon the land than did Saracen swords. Roving Magyars and Norsemen contributed to the devastation.
Thus are the land and its peoples, so ancient that every cut of spade or plow upturns shards, coins, inscribed stones, and bones of peoples gone before, who live in the blood of all who followed. This is the land, the people, and the tale of a girl, now a woman, born of both.
Otho, Bishop of Nemausus
The Sorceress's Tale 

 

 

 

Chapter 22 - Dangerous Magic

Pierrette's Journal

Otho was right. Reikhard's Christian demon could not live within an honest pagan. Bereft of the conflict that had divided the knight, the demon had nothing to feed on.
I departed before Otho performed his unconventional exorcism. Had I known of it, I might have been more prepared, for the raven had gone westward—as had I. Yet even with the demon gone, the knight was no different, except that his lust for women, land, and power was now wholly his own. At least I was free of him. . . .

* * *

"Tell me again," said Reikhard, after rinsing his mouth and throat with wine and spitting it on the stone-flagged floor.

"You tell me. How do you feel?"

"Like a boy, my Christian years gone. Am I truly free of them?"

"Of your years?" Otho was, having matched the Burgundian gulp for gulp. "You look no younger, but indeed you are free of your Christianity."

"Can you really do that?" wondered Reikhard pensively. "Still, the foul thing that oppressed me is gone, see?" He raised his stained nightshirt. There were pocks, scabs, and round scars, but no suppurating sores. "What I mean is, does . . . your Church . . . allow you to do what you did?"

"I don't think so. But it worked. No Christian demon can inhabit your pagan flesh."

* * *

Pierrette walked lightly, the morning sun at her back, warm against the chilly air of late winter. Though the route west was one long rise from sea level, the ground seemed as flat as a plain. The ass—whom she called "Gustave," after its former owner—carried food, water, and blankets.

The miles passed swiftly. By evening, the dragon's bones and the windy cliffs were behind. She ate cheese and bread drizzled with olive oil, with a pinch of dried thyme. Then she rolled herself in her blankets.

She had forgotten to weight the lids of the donkey's panniers with heavy stones. The beast had already nuzzled one lid off. She threw a loose stone. It struck Gustave's nose, and he backed away, snorting.

"If you eat my food, as well as your own, what use are you? I can carry my blankets myself. Without bread or cheese, I'll have to eat donkey meat." She was half-convinced that the ass understood.

She awoke before dawn colored the hills, and loaded Gustave, who had not further disturbed the panniers. She did not follow the track down to the village at the head of the calanque, but kept to the high ground where no brush impeded her.

The second night, having crossed the first divide, she realized that she had missed the chance to experiment with the changing nature of magic. She murmured the words of the fire-and-light incantation. A faint, blue glow, a cool halo, hovered by her fingertips.

At least the changes were consistent. She would try "Guihen's Charm," which conferred invisibility—her mother's spell, learned as a nursery-song:

 

"I cannot see my soul;
When I die, it will depart on the wind;
My soul is air.
My soul rises, and looks down on the rest of me;
What does it see?
My flesh is Water, running down the many ways;
My flesh is Earth, dust gathered by Air,
Moistened by dew.
The willow leaf and the wild olive tree
Are dust and water
Gathered by the wind,
And when my soul rises,
It will see my leaves and my branches."

 

She felt a brief flutter as if something wanted to change, to reflect the moonlight like silvery leaves, but Gustave's near eye was fixed upon her. He still saw her—the spell had not worked.

She pondered the words. What was different here? Ah! There were no willows or olives; the land was bleak and stony, scarred and dried by winds off the sea.

She changed the spell slightly. ". . . My flesh is Earth, dust gathered by Air, moistened by dew. The stunted oak and the fragrant bush are dust and water . . ." This time, the shimmery feeling was stronger. When it passed, she felt stiff, and strange. Why would an illusion make her feel so? Why couldn't she see anything?

She reached to brush an imperceptible veil from her eyes . . . but her arm would not move. Panic arose. She was as stiff and wooden as . . . as a stunted tree, and blind as wood. Sickened, she realized what had happened. She realized where she was: the high country, the wild land of Breb's primitive folk. "And," she said silently—because she could no longer speak, "seeing is believing!"

"My soul rises, and looks down on the rest of me; what does it see?" Belief was Anselm's sustenance, Yan Oors and Guihen's support. "What you see is what you get," Breb had repeated. And here she was, in this land where the essential postulate was "What you see, you must believe, and what you believe must be . . . real."

In Citharista, the spell made its utterer appear as willow or olive. Here the postulate equated perception with solid reality. The spell's user became a tree—a stunted, twisted oak with prickly leaves the size of a thumbnail, with a trunk no bigger around than a woman's arm. An immobile, speechless, helpless . . . tree!

Dawn rose over the humped hills. Pierrette was well and truly trapped. She could not speak, to utter a negating spell. Her roots went deep in fissured rock. She felt the sun quicken her sluggish sap, but could not see it, because she had no eyes.

Yet she could sense things. A disturbance in the breeze told her Gustave was edging close to the wicker pannier. Could a tree sense that? Of course it could. Perhaps the trees in Citharista's valley were insensate, but here trees—and rocks, even donkeys—had souls, because Breb's people believed they did. And she was caught in the web of their conviction. She wanted to weep, scream, tear out her hair—but she could not move a single twig.

* * *

The shadow of great wings flickered across rocks bleached white as bone, briefly blending with dark crevices and the pooled shade beneath stunted trees. Sensing a rich savor of despair, headier than carrion, the raven circled, its craving festering within.

There! But such agony of the soul could not spring from a mute donkey. What creature filled his nostrils with delicious hopelessness? With a rattle of rough, black feathers, it alit in the topmost branches of a straggling oak. Awareness surged upward through his feet—the tree was the source of the wonderful suffering.

The bird's guttural croak of joy did not go unnoticed. The ass edged closer, its wide, heavy-lidded eyes doubting, threatening. Why did the beast menace him?

Gustave brayed, teeth bared. With a raucous croak, the raven flung itself into the air. The donkey snorted as if it had scented something foul. Wide, brown donkey eyes followed the bird's flapping ascent, and its straight-winged course westward, daring it to return.

* * *

The sun rose higher. Pierrette wailed soundlessly. She struggled to move her wooden limbs, but her leaves trembled only with the breeze. Ever cautious, Gustave nosed closer to the panniers.

A strange sensation moved slowly as sap from Pierrette's roots upward, at last reaching the seat of her consciousness: among her roots she felt cool, smooth motion. A snake. She reached out with thoughts, not hands, to the dry, sinuous body she could not see. The serpent lay quiescent beneath her caressing thoughts, and Pierrette's panic faded, like heat absorbed by ophidian coolness—as if Ma herself had spoken calming words to a frightened little girl.

As smoothly as the snake had come, it departed. She felt the scrape of scales on rooty bark. "Thank you," she said—she would have said, had she a voice. Was the poor beast's soul now burdened with her departed terror?

Did a snake have a soul? Mother Sophia Maria would say not—mankind alone was in God's image, and had souls. But this was not Massalia; here other realities obtained. And if snakes had souls . . . then donkeys did too.

Gustave, though hungry, still hesitated, not convinced that his mistress, who had turned into an inedible oak, would not again reappear as a woman with a hefty stone in her hand.

Pierrette grasped that thought. Breb had not used a mule, because if he believed in mules, he would have needed one. His inhuman strength was inconsistent with donkeys and their kin. Beasts of burden were not part of his people's world. They were, however, of Pierrette's . . . and Gustave did not truly believe Pierrette was a tree. She collected her scattered thoughts, and remembered . . .

Ma had uttered no words, when she and Pierrette had become magpies. There had been only an inward twisting, then her soul flying free. Pierrette remembered how it felt. She wriggled inwardly, not disturbing her tiny, leathery leaves.

She rose, weightless, and drifted toward the unsuspecting—but always suspicious—burro.

Donkey-head. Donkey-brain . . . not very smart, but determined. Donkey . . . soul? The small, shapeless entity shrank from her. There was no room in Gustave for two souls.

The ass brayed and kicked up its heels. It backed away from the pannier of bread, cheese, oil, and dried, salted fish, eying it suspiciously. Pierrette, shaken, was cast off, to hover unattached.

"I knew it was too good to be true," the beast seemed to say, eyeing Pierrette indignantly. "I never believed she was a tree."

Pierrette felt the thread that linked her to . . . to a tree? No! To her body, standing upright, her toes curled to grasp stones under her feet, her arms outstretched, fingers spread to catch the noonday sun.

With a silent, joyous cry, she plunged down that thread, and into . . . herself. Her cry burst out aloud, from her own throat. Tears sprung to her eyes and blurred her vision. She let aching arms fall to her sides. She sighed, and felt the rush of breath from supple, moist lungs.

Gustave eyed her skeptically, more willing to believe her a young woman than a tree. When the crying, laughing girl flung her arms around his neck, and kissed his bruised nose, making him snort, he was not sure—if donkeys could indeed entertain such complex thoughts—if he could believe it. "This," he might have said, if donkeys could speak, "is entirely too good to be true."

It was too good to be true when Pierrette fed him choice morsels of yellow cheese. When she broke bread, she gave him the fine, chewy end of the loaf.

When she loaded him, she refrained from putting her foot on his ribs to pull the girth-strap tight, but merely waited until he could no longer hold his breath, then gave a quick tug when he exhaled.

When they walked, she left slack in his lead.

Stopped for a meal, she gave him oats, and let him drink a whole pan of water—though not enough for the oats to swell and bloat him.

She rubbed him down with rosemary before arranging her blankets for the night.

Yet his jaundiced view remained unchanged: he watched as she carefully weighted the panniers' lids with heavy stones. For her to do otherwise would indeed have been . . . too good to be true.

* * *

Magic was dangerous. Shortsightness made it more so. A spell like "Guihen's Charm" was not a simple geometric proof, but the hard center of an olive, surrounded by the ripe fruit of worldly belief. Postulates that shaped spells were not always expressly stated; sometimes they were only implied by the fabric of belief that enfolded and empowered them. That was the lesson she should have learned from the snake in Mother Sophia's herb garden.

She promised herself she would design an "escape hatch" from the next spell she uttered. She was lucky that Gustave had been there, and was skeptical. When Pierrette hugged his neck again, he remained skeptical. She felt it in his stiff, locked knees, saw it in the roll of his brown eyes, and she loved him for it.

Yet Gustave alone had not saved her. She herself had participated. . . . Had there been other influences? The shadow of black wings, darkened her thoughts—but her tree-memories held only the vaguest impression, and the thought slipped away. Had there truly been a snake amid her roots, a snake who reminded her that even the lowest creature possessed a metaphysical essence?

* * *

Occasional carters had levered obstructive rocks out of the way. Still, the "pavement" alternated between gravelly low spots and expanses of cracked bedrock. Afoot with Gustave, she took more direct routes than carts could follow.

She experimented cautiously, now understanding that crossing a divide was to become like a baby, with no understanding of the realm of beliefs and magics it was born into. Careless utterance of spells was suicide, unless one wanted to live as a tree, a stone, or a fading ocean wave.

Her spells were small. She changed the color of a flower, or shaped blue light into faces of people she knew. She really wanted—needed—to try one particular spell in this place she had named "Realm of Blue Light." It was Mondradd in mon: Parting the Veil of Years.

"Time will not change from one realm to the next," she told Gustave. "That would not be . . . elegant." She had read of the principle of elegance in an ancient scroll: the best spells were the simplest incantations that encompassed the desired effect, and that did not contradict others whose utility had been demonstrated.

Time was elemental, imbedded in the fabric of thought and magic; a spell that contradicted it would rend the universe itself. She suspected even Anselm's time-binding merely rearranged events without changing them. Was that what the Black Time was? Had some ancient mage constructed a spell so all-inclusive that he broke the wheel of time and stopped its turning? Was the darkness that divided Beginning and End the site of his experimentation? Gustave made no reply.

She did not think time's nature would be changed by so small a thing as a watershed, subject to time's passage; it eroded and wore down; the course of rivers changed as a function of time.

Time and Earth. Time acted upon Earth, and . . . and was constrained by it? Was the material universe a vessel that contained fluid Time? The land was like an onion, many-layered, some thick, some thin. Were events the substance of time?

Pierrette stretched her finite mind: time had been a wheel—one point defined its axle, one its rim. Now only the points remained, and time was a line, not a circle. Onions, wheels, and linear spokes tumbled in her head, almost making sense, never quite coalescing into a coherent image.

It stood to reason that where much had happened, where events were heaped thickest, one might find a flaw in the layering, a place where one time was close to another, and there part the veil of years between one era and another, from the Provence of Greeks, Romans, Phoenicians, Franks and Muslims to a simpler, less weighty time . . .

Yet might it not be easier to part that veil where nothing much had happened, where "now" was so little different from "then" that she might step through the barrier without even noticing it? Could both be true?

She stopped. Gustave, brought up short by the rope around his nose, balked and brayed. "Oh, be quiet," Pierrette said. "We've gone entirely far enough in this direction. I will not avoid the issue by engaging in fuzzy speculation."

Indeed, she had been avoiding a decision. Ahead, the trail wound on toward Massalia; to her left, another led southward to a broad calanque with a small beach at its head, a beach blackened by hearth-fires . . .

Wrangling with the nature of time, she had avoided facing this moment, where two paths branched. She could only take one path at a time. But what was time?

For all her thoughts about onions and wheels, certain truths remained: magic was dangerous; spells were complicated, and it was impossible to consider all the implications of place and belief. She had wanted to look like a scrub oak, but had become one. The Veil was a more complicated spell. Did she dare use it here?

She turned first one way, then the other. This way or that? Here or there? Then or now?

Stepping back in time was no different than stepping through Anselm's portal into the ever-noon of his keep . . . was it? Coming back from the calanque and the deep past, she would trace the same path and step forth into the moment when she had turned aside from the Massalia trail. With a sigh indistinguishable from a moan, she turned toward the sea.

* * *

"Bah!" the old man expostulated. "Are there no small stones on this bleak path?" Grunting, he pushed a flat limestone chunk atop his new cairn, a half mile beyond the last. He brushed sweaty locks from his face, noticing that his hair was quite dirty. Had he looked closer, he would have seen that his hair was not gray with dirt, but had black strands among the white. But there were still many white hairs.

* * *

The raven floated over the city, sensing something among the cut stones, wood, and red-brown tile roofs. Somewhere amid thousands of delectable, vulnerable souls, was one whose internal battle between Christian virtue and lust, between Christian lust and virtue, had once pleased him. Now she was an emptiness waiting to be filled. His circles became smaller, centering on the south shore of the harbor, on Saint Victor's abbey, a radiant source of strengths and weaknesses . . . and then on a smaller place nearby. With a croak of ravenlike glee, he pulled in his wings and plunged earthward like a great, clumsy hawk.

Marie sat up suddenly. What was she doing in this strange bed, this cold room? Her mind seemed filled with dark thoughts, like the rasp of stiff, black feathers. Gradually, memories filled the yawning chasm between her vows with Bertrand and her awakening here.

Memories: Jerome cavorted like a goat, deer's horns on his head, his great, crimson member distended. Herself in his bed, and her cries as he took her—cries at first of pain, and then . . . Her pallid skin flushed with arousal, and her breath came in short, shallow gasps. Jerome's low growls vibrated in her ear.

"Jesus help me!" she cried. In the corner of her eye the pale Christian wraith shook his head

"God help me!" she moaned. But the only god present was the Horned One, whose pleasuring she could neither deny nor live with.

Darkness had followed: Jerome had left her. She heard the glug, glug, of wine, and the knight's sigh. Then the other Marie, the pitiful, guilt-ridden Christian girl, had awakened, and had crawled out the window. She had fled through dark streets, naked but for her torn wedding dress, and had crawled up the stairs to her father's house.

"Fool!" grunted Marie, remembering the heat and the pleasure, not the shame. Fool to have run away. Fool, to have fouled her body and starved herself. For what? A tiny film of torn flesh? A god who let pious children be raped? Jesus, who stood by unmoved? Jesus? Perhaps it had been Otho, instead, or even a trick of moonlight.

"Priests!" Marie spat. Priests and nuns. She now remembered taciturn Agathe and motherly Clara, who had almost gotten her to smile.

Marie looked around the room. The door was heavy oak; she could not leave that way. She crossed to the unshuttered window. There was hardly any drop to the ground. . . .

 

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