The dappled trunks of plane trees stood bare, and the last lost leaves huddled soddenly in out-of-the-way places. Winter had brought only light rains, but it was chill.
Pierrette's first hint of new trouble was in the eyes of women. Actually, in those she did not see . . . There were averted glances, whispered comments. What were they saying?
Granna alone did not change. "They think you are a masc, like your mother. They're afraid your gaze will dry their breasts—and they remember the pox that still troubles the knight. He walks as if his trousers are full of twigs."
"My mother never did evil things."
"Your mother was not a succubus who changed sex as easily as those women change dresses."
"Neither am I!" Pierrette snapped. "What else are they saying?"
Granna sighed. "Will you snarl and gnash your teeth if I tell you? Remember, it's not me who's saying things."
"I'm sorry, Granna. Tell me."
"They say the magus seduced you, and that together you perform obscene rites with boars, bears, and even birds."
"Birds?" Pierrette snorted. "That shows how stupid they are."
"Did Leda consider it silly, when a god's seed swelled in her?"
"That's an old myth. Where do they get such stupid ideas?" How had she and Anselm been linked with John and with Guihen? As soon as she asked herself, she knew—this was the knight's next assault, to alienate her from the townsfolk, as her mother had been. Coldness grew in the pit of her stomach. Had Elen felt like this? Shunned and scorned, had she too suffered this loneliness and . . . had her misery come from the same source? Had the knight, not the gullible gens, been her mother's true murderer?
The days became increasingly difficult, with no one but Gilles for company. There was no money for wine, because no one bought oil from Pierrette, and her father was forced to remain sober for the first time in years. There was wood, prunings from the grove, burned sparingly to make it last.
Pierrette had not told Gilles her suspicions, but in his new, clear state of mind he had reached a conclusion much like hers.
"Where are you going, Father?" She worried when he went out, because his lucidity alternated with episodes of confusion.
"I must speak with the castellan," he said. "I want to get to the bottom of this."
"He won't tell you anything." She did not try to stop him.
She had been too long without Anselm's counsel. If she walked with Gilles, no one would suspect she was going to the Eagle's Beak. Considering the gens' suspicions, she dared not go openly. When they reached the sloping field, she would slip through a breach in the town wall, then through a dense stand of pines.
"Are you sure you want to do this, Father?" she asked him as they drew near the Burgundian's residence.
"I hear what they're saying," he responded. "I heard such things before—when your mother was alive. If the knight is behind the rumors, I must find out what he wants. He is not one to thrash about without purpose."
Indeed, he was not. When she and her father parted, Pierrette pondered that again. Something she had read bore on the knight's motivations—but no matter how she tried, she could not remember it. She only remembered P'er Otho pouring oil back and forth between two jars: good and evil, back and forth . . . tides ebbing and flowing in the calanques, much as the influences of gods and churches did across the ancient many-peopled land . . . good and evil. . . . She was close to understanding, but could not quite get there.
Voices drew her back to the here and now, at the juncture of her trail with the one that led up through the cleft in the red rocks. Peering from behind a feathery tamarisk, she recognized the people ahead. One was Claudia, carrying a basket of bread. They were going to the cape.
Recent experience made her cautious. Trailing just out of sight, she heard the harsh voice that challenged them. "Turn around, you women!" It was the soldier whose horse she had ridden. "Go back before I get a good look at you, or I'll have to tell my master who came to visit the sorcerer. You don't want that."
"We're just gathering herbs," said Claudia—but she kept her shawl pulled across her face. "Why are you stopping us?"
"The castellan has had enough of warlocks seducing his folk from God. When the hermit weakens from hunger, we'll break down his gate and take him for judging. Now go, before I change my mind." The three erstwhile pilgrims fled.
She followed them back to town, because there was no other way to the crest: Anselm was isolated from the gens whose attention and expectations had given him new life and substance. Was that the knight's intent?
Slipping through darkening streets, the old stone walls seemed to lean in, great and ancient weights that would crush her if they shifted the width of one finger. She hurried home; that scant refuge seemed all the more important, her father's company all the more welcome.
She found him at the table. The old rusty spatha lay before him, the Roman sword he claimed showed his descent from a soldier of Rome. Pierrette had heard, even before she saw the sword, the scrape, scrape of the black stone Gilles used to sharpen his axe. "Father! What are you doing with that?"
"It is time," he said from between clenched teeth, "for a free Roman to stand up against the Hun."
"Father! Put it down, and tell me what's wrong." Was he drunk? There was no cup, no sickly scent on his breath. Gilles's eyes were unmuddled.
"I lost one daughter to the barbarian," Gilles said. "I won't give him another."
"Father, tell me! What did Jerome say?" This was yet another blow aimed at her, at her friends and family.
Gilles did not stop honing the pitted blade—but he told her of his visit to Jerome.
Two points, she reflected, determine a line, and she now had enough to know the shape of the knight's plan, if not its ultimate intent. The women's accusations—that she was a masc, a sorceress—had been only a beginning. She was (or so Jerome had told her father) not only a masc, but the consort of the old magus, a participant in ancient rites of a sexual nature. "It is necessary," Gilles said in a fair imitation of the Burgundian's accent, "for Pierrette to be married as soon as possible, to save her from further corruption—to save her soul."
"To bind me to a husband who'll guard me as a cock guards its hens. With children at my breast, I won't go to the cape."
"Tell me it's not so!" Gilles pleaded. "Tell me you haven't fornicated with that old devil."
"He is not a devil, Father. He is a kind man—and I am as pure as when I was born. I intend to remain so. I will not make the mistake that . . ." She had been about to say, "that my mother made."
Gilles stood, sword in hand, held clumsily, as if it were a pruning saw. "You are all the family I have left. I will defend you."
"No, Father! Put that down." She grasped his wrist—and forced the sword to the table. "I'm touched that you would give your life for me—but you must not. You can't defeat the `Hun' and his soldiers like that. We must find another way."
Indeed, she was touched, but bitter as well, for it was far too late for his brave stand. That should have come when first Jerome importuned him, when Marie was still an excited virgin contemplating her wedding night, when . . .
Now a different path needed to be taken, not to Jerome's, not to the cape, blocked by the soldiers. There was only one way they could go. "We must ask Ma," she stated with confidence she hardly felt—but the walk might give Gilles's anger time to cool, for sense to prevail.
Always before, Pierrette had approached Ma as a child. This time, she knew what she wanted: a clear vision of what was to be, not in some faraway future time, but in the next days and weeks. The lines of battle were drawn.
As they neared the grove, the hot wind off the dry hills cooled, which was magic, of a sort—a spell whose words were the shape of the hills, the directions of seasonal winds, and entrapped moisture in the shadowed confines of the narrow valley.
"What will you do?" asked Gilles as they approached the pool.
"What did Mother do?" parried Pierrette.
Gilles hung his head. "I don't know. When we were young, we . . . we made love here. Then I slept. Perhaps my young wife did not—I can't remember."
"Perhaps it wasn't meant for you to know," his daughter said. "Perhaps you will again sleep, if the goddess commands."
"I don't want to sleep," Gilles replied. "I want to know what I must do."
"And you will, Father. Awake or asleep, the Lady will give you what is needed."
They stood before the small beech tree that was her special comfort. In a quiet tone, she intoned the first words of the spell her mother had taught her. Somewhere, in the leaves and branches high overhead, a magpie chattered, and she knew that all was well.
This time, she resisted the urge to lie down in fallen leaves and moss. Always before, she had let the spell take her where it willed, but then she had been a child. She was no longer innocent. The words she chanted were not rhythmic noises but a language, carefully constructed postulates that shaped her thoughts—and through them, her reality.
When first she had used the spell, she had not understood: she had wanted to peer ahead, but the spell's makers had not conceived of time as she did, and she had been thrust, as a magpie, into that dark future at the very end of time. Had time been a serpent biting its tail, she might have gone beyond that future to the past instead. This time . . .
Gilles's eyes were wide. What did he see, as the slender beech tree wavered and the woman of the pool stepped out from it? Did he too see Ma as a woman of middle years, ebony of hair and russet of clothing?
The figure shimmered, as if heated air rose in front of Pierrette's eyes, doubling itself, as if she were not focusing properly. One image stepped left, while the other remained still. The first took Gilles's hand. Pierrette let her fingers slip from Gilles's. The woman—whose face seemed subtly younger than her counterpart who remained still—led Gilles away. Pierrette did not turn her head to see where they went.
Ma-who-remained shook her head. "You don't understand the Parting of the Veil, daughter," she said softly. "Sit, and we shall explore it together."
Pierrette lowered herself to the leafy ground, as did her companion—whose skirts seemed without a hem, blending with the detritus of the forest floor.
"When time was a wheel, complete and round," said Ma, "the direction it turned did not matter." She looked expectantly at Pierrette as if she had given meaningful insight. "You must see it yourself, child. Rote learning suffices for a masc or a priest, but a sorceress must understand what she does."
When time was a wheel . . . The spell had come from the East with her ancestors' ancestors. Those unnamed folk had sown seeds in lands whose edges Alexander of Macedon had touched—Hindu folk who spoke of time as a wheel, and of events repeating endlessly. It did not matter which way the wheel turned. The furthest "future" might be reached by going "back," through the past. But time, Pierrette told herself, is a broken wheel with a missing felloe between past and future. . . .
"The spell doesn't reach to the future!" she exclaimed. "It reaches back! And because it postulates an unbroken wheel, it stops at the most remote place in . . . in the past?" The foundation of her universe trembled.
The past? Then was the Black Time not what would be, but what had been? Had the ruins of a greater Citharista existed before the busy Roman seaport of centuries ago, or the sleepy town of the present? It could not be. Yet it would explain much, if the spell sought the future through the past . . .
She covered her face with her hands. "It makes no more sense than the gate to Anselm's fort. It's not rational."
"Why is that, child?"
Pierrette explained about the black time.
"That must not trouble you," said the goddess. "Consider that the wheel is broken, now. You have seen the world buried in ashes. But when did the destruction occur?"
Pierrette's head spun as she fought to encompass new concepts. If she laid a rope on the ground, in a circle with both ends together, she could walk from any point on it to any other, whichever way she went. Yet if she stretched the rope straight, and stood at its midpoint, she could only tread half its length going one way, and half the other. One way was "past," the other "future." She was only allowed to go in a single direction. . . .
"The devastation occurred," she murmured, "before the break in the wheel. It `occurred' in what is now . . . the future, and what I saw, as a magpie, was only its aftermath, on the other side of the break in time's wheel . . . in the past." She shook her head sadly. "I can't look into the days ahead, can I? The spell only allows me to look back."
"That is mostly so," said Ma, "for you can only see what remains after the destruction. What transpires in the days or weeks ahead is a vanishingly small part of the whole, and has left few traces."
"What is beyond the Black Time?" Pierrette wondered aloud. "Whether past or future, does time simply end at the broken place on the wheel?"
"I can't say. We can't go forward, but must become immortal and live through the destruction into the Black Time . . . or . . ." She raised one eyebrow—an expression that Pierrette, had she owned a mirror, might have recognized as her own.
"We can't go back, beyond the relic of the Black Time that we can see . . ."
"We need not go so far—but we will go back," said Ma. She reached with both hands for Pierrette's. "Here in Provence, the past is rich loam beneath our feet, and the present is only dust atop it. The Veil of Years is thin. Let's pierce it together."
Ma reached into a fold of her garment, and opened her hand to show Pierrette: a brilliant green-and-black feather, and a tiny mushroom, round and small as a button. "Shall we fly?" she asked, a happy twinkle in her eye.
For the second time, Pierrette felt the tremor of moving air on wings—air firm and uplifting, as cool and real as water. She soared with the ease of a swimming fish, a fish of the lightest fluid—a bird of the air.
She soared and swooped, savoring the solid feel of air beneath wings, flowing over long tail-feathers. She flapped, reveling in the action of tiny, hot muscles that knew just what to do: pull in and raise folded wings effortlessly, spread them and push. Feel the burning effort in muscles bound tightly to the great keel of her breastbone. She rose, laughing magpie laughs.
Ma rose more easily, an indulgent mother enjoying her child's delight in a sun-warmed pool. But the child tires of aimless splashing—and Pierrette tired of merely being a bird. She wanted to go somewhere—and as soon as she decided, Ma knew.
They flew neither north nor south, up nor down. Pierrette was a swift, iridescent shadow in Ma's turbulent wake. They flew . . . back. They also flew westward, and the Citharista below them was a busy place with many carts in the streets, galleys, fat merchant ships, and a Roman bireme in the harbor.
They flew over cresting hills. In that past time the dragon's bones lay amid oak trees that covered slopes barren when she had traversed them in Gustave's cart. The shape of the land itself changed as they flew. In the brief "now" the magpies inhabited, the sea was lower; bays Pierrette had seen before were dry valleys, miles from the mother sea.
They overflew the headland where Pierrette had flung a challenge of blue light at the stars, where she had heard voices raised in ancient song. There was the calanque, as she had seen it before as through a mist, but now clear, and her chattering magpie cries caused her companion to circle back.
"This must be the place," said Ma, though not in words. "Shall we descend?"
Pierrette tipped her wing, trading altitude for speed—instinctive for a magpie, a wondrous equation for the girl within. But she would ponder that later. . . .
The sea was low, and seals moved over the rocks at its edge. A tiny white beach was dotted with now-cool hearths. Folk lived there in caves whose mouths dotted the steep eastern slope of the bay—the folk who had called to her. Even now, from the depth of memory, she heard them singing. "Come to us, come back to when this land is new."
New—as it was now, in this moment. No cities had been built. No ships sailed the shrunken sea. The elephants on the grassy flatlands were subtly different from the beasts Hannibal had led through Provence on his long trek toward the Alps. The deer in the woodlands were larger than those the gens of Citharista hunted. The people were also unlike the gens she knew.
Coming from their cave homes into the cooling light of afternoon, they did not notice the magpies that landed in the branches of a parasol pine. A man with hair like polished brass squinted into the lowering sunlight. "Tonight we'll make a fire on the beach," he decided, without speaking—yet the magpies heard his thought. They heard also his imagery of what would transpire at the edge of the fire, when all were full of rich meat from a fresh-caught seal, sated with crisp fat whose drippings fueled embers into fresh flame.
Pierrette heard those warm thoughts, and for a moment felt herself to be a blond-haired, full-breasted woman who lowered herself onto the man, smiling as she parted the strange, yellow hair of her womanhood to accept him . . .
Magpies could not blush, nor could their hard-billed faces feel heat at such delicious and unbidden revelations. Pierrette's discomfiture was not visible. Yet magpies could laugh, as Ma did then. The man, hearing magpie-chatter, looked up and smiled. He waved, and the two birds leaped into the air with a rattle of feathers.
The Golden Man, Pierrette marveled. The Golden Man of my daydreams. But we never did that in my reveries.
Later—aloft and westward—Pierrette turned her head toward her companion. The rush of air across her beak caused her to veer closer. "Is that what you wanted me to know?" she asked, remembering the man's hard heat and the woman's delight in the enveloping power of her wet loins, the quickening joy as her womb accepted his seed and made it hers.
"It wouldn't be fair to ask you to forego such delights if you didn't know what you might miss."
"Must I remain virgin forever?" Pierrette knew for the first time a small part of what her mother Elen had not been willing to do without.
" `Forever' has no meaning for one who parts the Veil of Years," Ma replied ambiguously. "Yet if you part that lesser veil, your maidenhood, you will never again part the other as we do today. And if lesser is parted within greater, you may never return whence you came." That made little sense, but Ma did not elaborate.
They were high over land only vaguely familiar. "What is that?" Pierrette exclaimed, seeing a city; they had travelled more than mere miles since leaving the cave-folks' realm.
"That is Massalia," said Ma.
"But where is the abbey?" asked Pierrette. "There isn't even a road south of the calanque."
"They have only just paved the Via Tiberia from Arelate to Roma. The abbey will not be built for a century or two."
"Shall we land there?" asked Pierrette. "Shall we sit on a branch and peer down at Lazarus at his devotions—or has he not yet come to Massalia? What year is it, down there?"
"We are flying from the far edge of the wheel forward," Ma said. "Lazarus has not yet come—but you may see him, when we reach our destination."
They flew north, then westward, with low mountains on their left and a wide lake on the right, then over an arm of the sea onto a flat, featureless plain.
There Pierrette experienced a strange tremor within, and she hesitated, losing altitude, descending for a closer look. Something beckoned, much as the cave people had, long before.
Yet there had been a momentary sensation of dread, as if she had passed near a place of terrible unhappiness, then left it behind. "What is that place?" she asked. She knew it was not what Ma had brought her to see, or the other magpie would have slowed before Pierrette did.
"The flat land is the Crau—the Plain of Stones, where Herakles fought your Ligure ancestors, as he returned home with the red cattle of Geryon."
"Who lives there now—in this time, whenever it may be?" It was not easy to shape that thought in any language Pierrette knew. No verb tense defined a present within the past.
"Horses roam there, and men capture them for breeding. They are sacred to Poseidon, but the old god's protection wanes."
They flew on. A broad thread of water broke into many channels—the mouths of River Rhodanus. They defined a sea of grass as splayed fingers define the space between them—the Camargue, where the old magics worked as they had been intended. Her excitement mounted, then faded—could a magpie's beak and lumpy tongue shape a spell? No, she would have to be there as herself, to perform her experiments.
Beyond a tangle of lagoons were low, sandy islands held together by the trees that grew upon them. Ma shifted her course. Straight ahead, Pierrette saw smoke, and discerned roofs thatched with long salt-grasses.
"That's where we're going," Ma said. "A fishing town that will someday be called `the Holy Marys of the Sea.' "
Two magpies atop a dead cypress went unnoticed. Though out of their usual range, on beaches populated by gulls and stilt-legged birds, magpies were not the only foreign visitors to that remote shore, then or thereafter.
Then? Pierrette had seen Massalia when Romans manned its walls. She had seen the bay at Sormiou millennia earlier. If those houses were where the saints from the Christian holy land had arrived after the transfiguration of Jesus, then what Pierrette was seeing was "long ago."
The Abbess Sophia Maria, suggesting that Marie might benefit from a visit to her namesake's shrine, had described a bustling town where the Archbishop of Arles sponsored a fortified church on the site of the saints' graves. But Pierrette saw no church.
" `When' is this?" she asked her companion, twisting a Latin tense in an uncomfortable manner.
"It is forty-four years since the boy Jesus was born in Nazareth," said Ma. "Mad Gaius, called Caligula, is dead, and Claudius reigns."
People emerged from a thatched house. A skinny man waved and called to someone working in a boat on the beach. "Lazare! Come see us away." A husky fellow emerged from the vessel and swung gracefully over the rail onto the sand.
Pierrette intensified her gaze, as if to burn every detail of the scene into her mind. She was seeing an event of more than religious import. Those people would shape history with their words and deeds. Even in her time Provence—of all Europe—echoed their influence. The borders of nations, the reigns of monarchs, would be decided by what they said and did.
Two white-haired women wore clothing like Grecian robes, but with a foreign drape to them, much stained and mended. Their faces and hands were dry and crinkled from a sun no less intense than that of Provence. A dark-skinned woman with a beaky nose and kohl dark eyes hovered close, a nurse or doting servant.
The fellow who had called out was perhaps fifty, dressed in undyed tunic and kilt, fisherman's clothes. Another, whose black hair was streaked with gray, wore a tannin-brown robe. His face held scholarly introspection, like Anselm's or P'er Otho's when deep in thought.
Beside him stood a younger woman who stood out because her hair was not black or gray, but honey brown. Gold highlights danced at her temples where wisps sprang free.
"Remember her," said Ma in a soundless whisper, "for you will meet her someday."
Another woman stood apart, facing the sea. Her dress was bright blue, faded and bleached from seawater. The man from the boat flung an arm about her in brotherly fashion—he was indeed her brother, and brother to the light-haired woman as well. A strong family resemblance showed in their faces, and in the lightness of their hair.
"Remember the two oldest women," said Ma, "for you will meet them—and not long after we return to your own place and time."
"I wouldn't know what to say to them," Pierrette replied. "Those are the saints—the two Marys who lie buried—who will lie so?—in a crypt beneath the shrine."
"You've had no trouble speaking with old women before," said Ma with an ironic overtone. "There is Granna . . . and me."
"That man who came from the wrecked ship is Lazarus, whom they say was raised from the dead. She whom you say I'll meet someday is Marie Madaleine—Magdalene—whose bones will lie in the valley of the Holy Balm, below the cave that is her shrine."
"Indeed. And do you know the others?"
"The skinny one is Cedonius—born blind, it's said, but now healed; the other must be Maximinus. Lazarus embraced Martha, whom P'er Otho says Jesus chastised for her busyness. The one who cares for the old women, then, is Sarah the Egyptian, patroness of Gypsies." Pierrette sighed. Of course, a magpie cannot really sigh, but Ma heard a sigh when Pierrette intended one.
Seven people saying good-bye. Magdalene would wander Provence, preaching in Lugdunum and in villages, and would at last retire to her cave a few valleys north of Citharista. Sarah would remain with the eldest Marys, and would minister to the pagan Gitanes, the Gypsies—and thus to all the world "Romish" folk wandered. Maximinus would build his abbey, and would bury Magdalene there.
Lazarus would become the first bishop of Massalia, and would at last lie beneath the stones of Saint Victor's. His sister Martha would subdue a dragon—the Tarasque. Was it kin to the dragon whose bones lay atop the hills east of Citharista? And Cedonius, living testament to what Pierrette considered the magical power of Jesus? Perhaps he remained on the coast with the three women.
The group divided. Four remained, and four departed. The road led north until it met the stone of the Via Tiberia. Those four would walk together on the cart track until they reached the Roman road at Arelate.
"Come child," said Ma. "We must return, or the fine thread that joins you to your mortal self may part, and leave you forever a bird."
Pierrette, having been told nothing of that, became suddenly willing to depart. The remaining women had gone beneath the thatched roof, and Cedonius sat alone outside, peering at the sun-sparkling sea—as if he could not, in the years remaining to him, ever see enough of what that sun illuminated.
On the flight homeward, Pierrette was not tempted to dawdle over even the most impressive sights.
Over the Camargue's sea-wet grasses a flock of flamants arose. Black, white, gray, and rose feathers flashed in the evening light.
An old man emerged from his reed-thatched cabane, and fed sweet grasses to the lithe doe who crept from the thicket. Pierrette's bird-shadow flickered across his upturned face, but her magpie eyes were looking far ahead, to the beech trees where her true body lay, a silent husk without spirit to motivate it.
With great relief the eager magpie spiralled down among leafy branches to the pale form asleep on a bed of leaves.
With equal relief, Pierrette lifted sleep-tingling hands before her face, reassuring herself that she had indeed returned, and was a bird no longer.
Gilles was rubbing his face, as if his body also had been untenanted, and himself far away.
"Where did you go, Father?" she asked as they walked westward down the broadening valley. "Whom did you see?"
"Go? I didn't go anywhere. I remained beside the pool the whole time you slept. I . . ." His face reddened, like a blushing child's.
"Tell me!" she pressed mischievously, already suspecting what had—or what he thought had—transpired.
"I . . . I was with . . . your mother," he said, not meeting her eye.
"I'm no child, Father," she protested, giggling. "Did you speak together, as well as . . ."
"We spoke!" Gilles said quickly. "My beloved gave me good news."
"Tell me. I need good news."
"I've been afraid, child. You've seen my hands tremble, and . . . and I haven't been right in my mind. Now I know I'm not doomed to suffer the madness and foolishness of old age. I'll live a while, with all my faculties, and then I'll die. That's a promise."
"I'm glad, Father," Pierrette said softly. "I feared for you." She had no doubt that it would be as he said. Whether he died in a month or a decade, there would be no degrading descent into childishness or second infancy—and that was promise enough.
As for her own voyage—or vision, if such it was—she was less satisfied. What did she know that she had not known before? What had she learned that was of use? Flying across so many miles, years, and centuries, she had been too busy to ask what she had wanted to know.
Now it was too late. Her problems had not lessened, for having flown so far from them. Her only reassurance that she would prevail against the castellan Jerome—and whoever hid behind his coarse Burgundian face—was that Ma's intentions for her seemed to stretch long ahead, and she would have to survive the next days and weeks to fulfill them.
The door of their house was ajar. They had not left it so.
"Gilles," said the horse-soldier whose bowed legs stretched across the hearth. A heartily uneconomical fire blazed. A month's firewood was being consumed to warm one soldier's damp toes. "And Piers—no longer a boy, I'm delighted to discover. We, too, have much to say to each other."
Gilles stood there, angry over this violation of house and hearth. Pierrette was lost. What was there to speak of? "You gave me a ride on your horse, once—but I don't even know your name."
"I am Lucius," he said. " `Luc,' like the gospel writer." He chuckled self-indulgently. "I'm a bit of a physician myself, having patched a few sword slashes in my time."
"What do you want with us?"
"Why, to discuss our future—yours and mine—with your father. I'm a northerner, but customs can't be all that different between us. Dowries . . ."
"Marriage? You want to marry me?" She could not decide to laugh or to scream—so she did neither. "Where did you get the idea that I'll marry you—or anyone?"
His eyes were glittery hard. "You've heard what they're saying about you? Marriage is the best you can hope for. You won't find a better man than me—nor another willing to have you." His words dripped scorn, but his expression was unperturbed, as if he spoke only of common facts.
Pierrette, raised as a boy, had no practice in the womanly art of getting one's way without confrontation. Her perspectives were not a girl's, either. She saw the gnarly soldier as the boys had, when she had been one of them. His wiry toughness, the strength in his bare, tanned forearms, even the fine tracery of scars from enthusiastic workouts and actual battles did not repulse her, but added glamour to an otherwise ordinary middle-aged man.
That attitude saved her from a tactical mistake. When she replied, she was neither arch nor mocking, haughty, nor flirtatious. "I'm sure I would find no better man," she said evenly. "You were kind when you thought me a boy, and I suspect you would be no less so to a wife . . . but what are people saying? No one has threatened me."
The soldier reacted well. He told her she was accused of licentious acts and pagan rites—mostly with the old magus, but with husbands from the town too. "If you remain unwed, the jealous wives will come for you, some night." He glanced at Gilles. "Just any husband may not be protection enough—but no man in Citharista will willingly face me. They'll keep their wives at home." He smiled, patted his thigh. "Come here, and we'll seal our bargain with a kiss."
"I've never been kissed," she said truthfully. "I'm not going to begin today. And I am a maiden," she said with a certain heat, "despite what the women in the market may say."
He peered closely at her, with a curious expression. "Protestations are unnecessary. I'm not too proud to march in the dust of the van. At any rate, you wouldn't be a virgin by the time you came to my bed. The castellan would see to that."
The obviousness of that had escaped her. Of course—that was Jerome's intention. Yet Pierrette felt only sickened and sad, thinking of poor Marie, not herself. The Horned One would not drive her mad. It was not going to happen.
"I'm not lying. I am a virgin—and I intend to remain so. It has nothing to do with you, or your offer. There are other considerations."
"I'm not offended," said Luc, rising to his feet. "Should we marry, we would have a fine time—but I'm content as I am." At the door he turned. "If you want to save your own skin, you'd better be able to prove you're virgin still. If you reconsider . . ."
"I won't," Pierrette said firmly. "Tell your master that one of my father's daughters is enough. He shall not have—nor destroy—the other."
The soldier nodded, and set off eastward, his leather soles making little noise on the dirt-covered cobbles. Gilles nodded his approval of his daughter's handling of the affair. "It isn't yet time for me to stand up for you," he said sheepishly. "You did well by yourself. Don't be angry."
"Angry, father? You know what you must do—and what not."
"Still, I wish . . ."
"Hush, Father." She placed a finger on his lips.
When Pierrette went to shut the door, she saw Father Otho, bearing a scrap of parchment. He waved the page at the soldier, then read from it. Luc shook his head. Pierrette was curious. But when Otho arrived at the door, other concerns intervened, and she did not ask.
"I came as soon as I heard," he said. "He did no harm?"
"He's not evil like his master Jerome," said Pierrette. "We parted without anger, but without settling anything between us—or between me and his Burgundian lord." She sighed. "This can't go on," she said. "I must leave Citharista."
"Leave?" asked Otho. "Where would you go—a lone young woman?" He glanced at the parchment, now tucked beneath his cincture.
"I can be a lone boy, if I need to." She brightened—suddenly understanding the meaning of her recent magpie's voyage. "I have a destination in mind." She mentally traced the route the two birds had taken.
"Jerome won't allow you to leave," Otho said. "If you anger him, he'll turn the gens—and his soldiers—toward the Eagle's Beak, and the old mage."
"No! Anselm has harmed no one! Jerome has no quarrel with him."
"He'll use him to have his way with you. The old fort's walls wouldn't hold against a platoon, nor the mage's magic against swords and axes."
"Don't tell me I must marry Luc, the soldier, and spend my wedding night with that . . . that goat."
"You must leave Citharista despite Jerome," Otho reflected. "I was about to show you this. It's from the abbess." He handed the parchment to Pierrette, who struggled to read the crabbed hand:
Marie has taken a turn for the worse. She rallied briefly, and began taking walks with sister Claude, though she refused to join us in prayer. Now she sits alone in darkness. We dare not leave her a candle, because she set her clothing on fire once, and didn't even cry out for help.
Send the boy Piers, to take her to the shrine of the Marys, by the sea. We have done all we can, and it is not enough.
"I must go!" Pierrette cried. At last there was a difference she could make, however slight, and however poor the chance of a happy outcome.
Otho shook his head. "I showed the letter to Jerome, and just now to Luc. The one will not allow you to depart, and the other will not turn his head and let you slip past—even if you swear to marry him when you return."
"I don't think he cares about marriage—but he's a good soldier, and does what he's ordered to." She shook her head hopelessly. "Is there no way?"
"Perhaps there is," Otho said. "Tell me the truth, child—are you indeed a maiden still?"
"Is my maidenhood the talk of the town? Yes. I am untouched. Now tell me what must be done."
"The castellan has made much of the pagan rites he claims you have practiced. He calls you a maenad—one who cavorts with Dionysos."
"I know what a maenad is. Does he claim that I—with other madwomen—run through the woods tearing apart woodcutters and hunters?"
"I don't think Jerome knows of that part of the rite," Otho said.
"His master does," Pierrette grumbled angrily.
"His master? The Frankish king?"
"His master who wears horns. His master, whom you call . . . Satan."
"Those are harsh words, child. Jerome pays tribute to Cernunnos—but Satan? If so, you are at terrible risk. If not . . . such an accusation puts your soul in danger. `Do not speak his name, lest he hear you.' "
"You said there was a way to defeat him."
"A way for you to get away, to make him seem a fool for his contentions, so no one will pursue you—or slay old Anselm. Now you must trust me."
He would say no more. "Your reactions—everyone's—must be natural and unrehearsed. Friday we'll meet outside the chapel, where I hope your difficulties will be resolved." He chuckled. "If all goes well, a problem of mine may well evaporate too." He would not explain what he meant.
Pierrette felt as bleak as the weather. Cold rain splattered the steps and pavement, for winter had come. There had been little sunshine in her life, and the future looked no brighter. If P'er Otho's "plan" failed, Anselm, alone on his bleak cape, would weaken, or would be overwhelmed by soldiers.
Her thoughts strayed to the Camargue, seen through a magpie's eyes. If she could escape Citharista, perhaps there in the vast unruly sea of grass, where old magics were said to endure, she could utter an ancient calling-spell, and cry out to Minho of the Fortunate Isles to allow long-lost Anselm to return home. . . . Then she could continue with Marie to the saints' shrine.
Would Gilles have to sell the grove for a crust or two of bread? How could she abandon him? He was too proud still to accept charity from the small-minded gens. Ma's prophesy did not promise long life—only that he would not sink into the madness of age. But would Marie languish and die if Pierrette stayed here?
In the climate of fear and distrust Jerome fostered, Yan Oors and Guihen would suffer as well. Even if the Evil One did not consume them as he had Cernunnos, no loaves of bread would be left on doorsteps, no bowls of milk.
When Otho left the house, neither Gilles nor his daughter spoke. They went silently to their beds without supper—for there was no food in the house.