As a village priest I observed that children's capacity for language is greatest in their early years. Yet there is no fixed age when it becomes possible to reason.
"In the beginning," children learn, "was only God." Yet God created an Earth and a Universe to surround it. From what font did He gather the materials? For a child, remembering its amazed pride of creation when it first grasped conscious control of its own bowels, it is no great step to assume that all matter sprang from the bowels of God.
Pierrette's logic outpaced most children's. Foeces demanded food, and in God's beginning, there had been none. Logic was not satisfied. "Someday I will figure it out," she promised herself, but for the time contented herself with lesser logical exercises.
Her restraint, had anyone known of it, would of itself have defined her as a very logical being.
Children who are different often isolate themselves. By the time Pierrette was ten or eleven, her separation was conscious and deliberate. No doubt discomfort with the deception she was required to practice contributed. Her small stature and inability to compete in boyish striving limited her, too. But I suspect it was mostly natural inclination.
Some lone children become merely strange. Those with God-given resources may become observers of the human condition, practitioners of solitary arts like painting, philosophy . . . and magic.
Pierrette, spurred by innate intelligence, by vague comprehension of her mother's arrested ambitions, contented herself with developing her logical mind far beyond what might be expected of a child of her years.
Otho, Bishop of Nemausus
The Sorceress's Tale
In the tiny cellar, Pierrette dipped her fingers in water. She dribbled the fluid on a pinch of tinder in another bowl, while a dun snake watched with silent stare. It was a viper, subsisting on occasional mice, but she imagined it a friend.
Touching the wet tinder to the candle's flame didn't ignite it. Yet tinder dribbled with olive oil burnt with sputtering and black smoke.
"The essence of fire," (she didn't frame her thoughts in quite such mature words), "is in tinder and oil, but water is heavier and stronger, and drives it away."
Flames fascinated her. Were they alive? Were the flames of a burning log the escaping soul of the tree? Was steam the soul of water, rising until the pot boiled dry? Was a person's soul a fire within?
She dared not discuss such speculations with anyone, even Father Otho.
Perhaps her preoccupation arose from memory of the gens' bonfire, the night she and Marie hid in the cave, or of the torches the villagers had carried, a snake of lights creeping into the hills. Perhaps it was the flames that lit the almost-forgotten face of their rescuer, of whom Pierrette remembered only feathered clothing and mobile ears that grew larger in her memory as months, then years, passed.
The hidden wooden box gave new scope for experimentation. She recognized the aromas of some powders: rosemary and thyme gathered on the unforested hills, other herbs from woods and garden, white ashes and black, powdered charcoal. But there was also red powder that smelled like spoiled liver, and white crystals that puckered her tongue. Some burned easily, giving off strong odors. Others didn't burn at all, or smothered flame.
Liquids didn't burn, havingas she thought of itwatery souls. Then she found the tiny bottle, blue-green glass with a stopper so carefully ground that no essence had escaped in two years' storage. That liquid made tinder burn fiercely. It even burned all by itself in a bowl, and the flames pooled like water, filling it, then overflowing onto the bedrock floor. Had Pierrette known the word, she would have announced to herself that fire, like water and air, was a fluid, and that those three elements were unlike the fourth, which was earth, and which didn't flow.
Her curious play, limited to the selection of materials in the box, inevitably involved substances in various combinations. Always, the unifying element was fire.
One particular melange, when dampened with the liquid essence of fire, burst with a loud poof! into a ball of flame. Acrid, rolling smoke forced her outside. Her eyes streamed, so she didn't even see the smoke that crept up between aged floorboards and out through the house's loose shutters.
But Gilles, ascending the steps to the house, noticed, and saw his small daughter wiping tears with a soot-blackened hand. He pulled her away from billows of foul smoke.
"Oh, not again!" He knew the source of the poisonous stuff. In his child's wet, blackened face, he saw what he most feared.
Elen's eyes, streaming tears.
Elen's face.
What now? He should have destroyed Elen's powders, but he had so little that had been hers. He sat rocking his child, bewildered and hurt.
By the time Marie returned from her stall in the marketplace the smoke had dissipated, but an acrid stink clung to walls, clothes, and bedding.
She too knew what the odor meant. Unlike Pierrette, Marie had become devout in the aftermath of death and terror. "I'll find Father Otho," she said, and her set facea Roman face not at all like Pierrette or Elen's elfin visagesallowed no disagreement.
Otho squatted in the dusty street, and Gilles, more stiffly, did the same, bringing their faces level with Pierrette's. P'er Otho looked sad and amazed, as if she were a spirit from some far past. Gilles's eyes held fear and anger. The men looked from her to each other, knowingly, with resignation.
Elen, thought Otho. Elen, before I knew her. He should rise up, red-faced, and threaten her with God's wrath, denouncing her pastime, but he did not, as he had not chastised her mother.
Otho wondered if Gilles knew of his long-past dalliance with Elen, by the spring Ma. Unlikely, yet in that triangle of figures, two large and one small, Otho sensed a common love, a shared loneliness evoked by the elfin-faced child.
"I promised to take her about," Gilles said. "I should have shown her more work in the grove, and taught her to pull in my nets."
"She shouldn't be left idle." Otho pondered. "She has an agile mind. Perhaps I should help occupy her. But how?" Again, silence reigned.
Pierrette stirred. "Teach me," she said firmly. "Teach me to read."
Thereafter the child found no idle hours for her cellar.
From Gilles she learned how best to prune long, green shoots that bore no fruit. He showed how such shoots, packed with moss, could grow roots. "The new trees will bear fruit for a lifetime or two," he said, drawing upon ancient lore transmitted through generations, "and then they'll die. It's better to plant the olive pits. Trees grown from them will live forever."
Perhaps "forever" wasn't attainable, but the thickest, most gnarled trunk in the grove hadthough Gilles didn't know itbeen grown from a seed planted by a Greek settler from Massalia, when Rome itself was a collection of mud huts on just one of its seven hills. The tree had died the same year the Christ had been hanged on the wood of another tree.
Gilles knew none of that, but he knew olive trees, and he taught Pierrette to fish, too. He did not, for many weeks, lead her to the sacred pool, though he yearned to spend a day with his bittersweet memories, where he felt closest to Elen.
Father Otho filled Pierrette's remaining hours. Books, of course, were so rare that Otho had not one. But he chalked letters for her on the chapel's red tile floor. Often he sent her with a sanded plank and charred grapevine to copy inscriptions from the Roman funerary steles, amid grazing goats that belonged to Marcellus the Dacian.
"What does this say?" she asked one day, her smooth board filled with odd letters copied from a stone washed out of the bank by winter rain.
"Is that Celtic? Where did you come on that?" His tone was wrathful. "Erase it! I'll break the stone."
"What does it say?"
"I forbid you to think of it."
He might as well have commanded the hills to dance to a shepherd's flute; Pierrette could think of little else. Not only were there Latin and Greek, but another sort of writing, in a tongue with its own mysteries.
That night she dreamed of a deer-horned man dancing about a deep grave-pit, a dark place like the cellar. His chant was familiar, but she could not understand the words. The tune she remembered hearing from someone who held her. It brought memories of warm softness, and something that tasted like goat's milk, but thinner and sweet. She awoke with damp cheeks and stinging eyes, and an urgent need to go to the hills.
Though it was hours before dawn, Pierrette rose and dressed. She carried her sandals until she reached the outskirts of the village, where dust, sand, and ancient cobbles gave way to gravel and sharp stones.
The wind was off the land, not the warm sea, and she shivered, even though her exertion on the steep upward trail should have warmed her. Ghosts of memories arose with each step.
Here had wound the glitter-scaled dragon, the winding line of torches, that had hunted her mother.
There was the cave where she'd hidden, abandoned by mother and father alike. Beyond, as she turned southward beneath tall pines, was the barren cape, plunging on either side to the sea, narrowing to a natural stone span that led outward . . . to a dark wooden doorway now closed.
She hesitated near an odd willowlike bush. Where had she seen one like it? The upper surfaces of its leaves were rich green, their undersides pale and silvery.
She stared, as if the very force of her gaze would penetrate its illusion. Gradually, limned with light and shadow, she saw what she suspected was waiting for her to see.
"Ha, child!" said Guihen. He wiggled his overlarge ears. "That didn't take you long. Are you growing stronger, as well as more lovely? Or am I losing my touch?" His grin was toothy. "But then, you always saw through my illusion."
Pierrette wasn't sure what he meant about growing stronger. And more lovely? She was a small, bony-kneed child of seven. Later, she would think about that, and wonder.
"What are you doing here?" she asked.
"I came to warn you."
"Of what?" Wisps of fine hair at the back of her neck stiffened. "You're only a willow bush, and I'll push you aside." She was angry. She wanted her mother.
Guihen sighed. "Elen is not here, child. She lives in a green and lovely vale."
"She's not in heaven. P'er Otho said so."
"No, her place is of this earth, but you won't find it on the Eagle's Beak. But here, beyond that gate, is the magus Anselm . . . and a terrible fate for a little girl."
"Mother said to seek out the mage."
"She was distraught. She didn't think. Go back to your father and sister."
"Don't try to stop me!"
"If you knock on that gate, you won't return to Citharista unchanged." Guihen's ears flapped, as if agitated. "Would you deny yourself an ordinary life: husband, children, a place to call home?"
Pierrette hesitated.
"Go back, or be doomed to make your bed in strange places. Go back, lest time itself bend about you, and you not find what you seek for a hundred hundreds of years!"
Pierrette was too young to value the prospect of a husband and children. And her own bed was not the secure place it had seemed before that terrible night she first had met Guihen.
The sprite's speech gave her pause, but the dark gate ahead beckoned. "Are you sure Mother isn't there?"
"Elen rests in the arms of her own mother, and her mother's mother, beside the pool called Ma. Seek her there, if you must." The gentle pressure of Guihen's spidery hand on her shoulder turned her. "Go home," he commanded. "Enjoy what little you have, for it is sweeter by far than what awaits you here."
Pierrette felt the soft branch brush against her shoulder, a willow branch, not a hand. The downhill trend of the trail quickened her steps, imparting a false eagerness to her pace.
She did as she was told, and made her way back to the village. But Citharista, her father and sister, her lonely, motherless house and bed, gave her heart no ease.