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Epilogue

The teller of tales is a worm in an onion. Finding a layer sweet and juicy, he may follow it, nibbling what pleases him and ignoring the rest. Much remains untold, of course.
The folk of Citharista are mere shadows in this tale, though the woman in the third house from the olive press still trembles with delighted recollection of a night in the woods, as she nurses her pig-faced baby. Young Marius regales his drinking-mates with episodes of life as a soldier under Reikhard, chasing thieves and highwaymen from the Roman road. The shepherd Claudio still excites himself with imaginary women, and has not married. In Massalia Lovi writes accounts of what he has seen every time he returns from a voyage with Muhammad abd' Ullah ibn Saul.
At crossroads Gitane nomads meet others of their tribes. Around their campfires they share what they have witnessed, and the stories spread. They are told around Illyrian and Iberian campfires, on the Silk Road to the Far East, and in the fields of Saxon England. Does this spreading plague, this insidious propaganda, have effects outside the minds of those who hear or tell the tales? Is the Evil One's calendar set back with each retelling? We do not know.
Sometimes our small worm, finding his layer gone papery and dry, will burrow deeper and taste perhaps the childhood of a boy who would become Yan Oors, witnessing the forging of his iron staff and his slaying of the dragon. Perhaps our burrower will glimpse Protis the Phoacean in bed with Gyptis, the Ligure princess, whose dowry was the hill upon which old Massalia stands. . . .
Perhaps the rootworm will find Pierrette dreaming of the Black Time, and she will again fill baskets with dried fish and cheese, and lead the dubious Gustave on another trail, for much remains untold. Of Magdalen, Ma promised Pierrette "Remember her well, for you will meet her again, some day," and that day has not yet come. Pierrette's sandals have never touched Ugium's cobbled pavements, nor has she discovered what sweet sorrow awaits her on the desolate Crau Plain. She has not solved the riddle of King Minho, or his conviction that she has teased and tormented him for at least a thousand years. She has never seen the wild black bulls of Camargue, and the Black Time still threatens, perhaps a bit further off than before.
Yet for now she abides, learning her craft from books, testing her mastery of spells. Winds blow the scents of rosemary and thyme from the heights, the odor of salt from the sea and the Camargue, and the fragrance of wet greenery from the head of the long valley where her mother has become a thick tree with roots deep in the earth.
If sometimes a stork lands with a rattle of feathers upon a parapet high on the Eagle's Beak, remembering a love that has not yet been, and is long past, and silently watches her at her study, that tale lies deeper within the onion of the land and the years, and remains yet untasted.
Otho, Bishop of Nemausus
The Sorceress's Tale 

 

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