The first folk were slight and dark. Elsewhere, on the high plains, yellow-haired folk forged long knives of bronze and tamed horses. Between horizons unbroken by trees or mountains, only the sun stood higher than they themselves atop their steeds. Ma, the earth was dirt beneath their hooves. Their souls turned with fear and adoration to the vastness above. Is it any wonder that when, with long blades and horses, they entered into ma of the dark, quiet lands, it was as conquerors?
New men and old found differences to ponder: earth gods and sky god did battle in their faculties. To survive, the earth folk resorted to slyness, theft, and lies; inevitably the sky folk lumped those faults with the old ways and customs. They coined new words, and with the words were born the realities: Evil and Good.
Otho, Bishop of Nemausus
The Sorceress's Tale
"I miss my mother," Pierrette said, after Marie had left for the marketplace with her jars of oil.
Lonely pain crossed Gilles's face. Must she remind him? The child's uncanny resemblance was hard enough. Then, chiding himself for his selfishnessand indulging himself as wellhe sighed and said, "I'll take you to a place your mother loved."
Her motherless state was more his fault than Elen's. Her quest for a spell to give him a male heir had driven the villagers to fear and murder. He could not give the child her mother, any more than he could restore his wife, but perhaps the shimmering pool, where water upwelled in bubbles from its sandy bed, would ease her pain as it did his.
For him, the pool Ma assuaged guilt as well as loneliness.
Citharista lay ringed by rocky hills, open on the southeast to the Middle Sea. The rough ridge of the Eagle's Beak sheltered it from west winds. Atop the southernmost of the three scarps forming the Beak, at the sea's edge but high above it, stood the mage Anselm's keep.
North of the scarp, hills swelled so high that the Beak seemed no more than reddish fragments of broken pottery at the sea's edge. One trail followed the coast west to Massalia, and another led north, where it joined an east-west Roman road. Only one other led out of the town, Gilles's chosen path; it led northeastward and up into an ever-narrowing valley. Only a few shepherds ever used it.
When they passed beyond the last house, the last fig and olive tree, Pierrette fell a few steps behind. Her eyes missed no detail of rock, tree, or silhouetted mountain; she engraved in her mind the way to their destination.
Once arrived, tired, thirsty, and footsore, father and daughter drank like deer on all fours. They tossed sandals aside and laughed as they plunged dusty feet into the clear, icy pool. Then Gilles stretched out to nap, his mind more at peace than at any time since his last pilgrimage here.
Her thirst slaked, Pierrette looked about. Sunbeams wound their way downward between wide, flat leaves, and turned dark moss to a green like the water of the sea.
The spring Ma created about itself a strange foreignness. She knew nothing of how seeds blew from faraway places, how trees and flowers responded to water-soaked ground, to hills that sheltered them from drying winds. The tiny, moist cleft seemed a world unto itself, open to them only by cosmic accident, God's oversight, or . . . magic.
Pierrette wandered about among the odd treesbeeches, Gilles called them. Their gray, rippled bark reminded her of Father's thin, muscled arms as he pulled in a net or strained to reach a high olive branch.
"Oh!" she exclaimed, muting her voice with a hand. "How beautiful." Sunlight illuminated dry leaves spread about the base of a small beech no thicker than her slim wrist, making a hollow much like the lap of a woman clad in a heavy woolen skirt. A ring of tasty-looking mushrooms grew around it.
Pierrette lowered herself amid the leaves, curling up in the sunbeam, and rested her cheek on a closely folded arm. Warm sleep was only moments in coming, drifting on air as soft as a blanket made of sea-bird's down.
She only slept for a little while, yet she felt rested. Her feet no longer tingled. Father slept, oddly silent; at home he often snored.
As she got to her feet, something fluttered from her shouldera magpie feather with a black vane on one side of its central spine, and bright green that shifted to indigo, then to russet, on the other. Pierrette picked it up and spun it between thumb and finger, delighting in the shifting colors.
Watching, spinning the feather, she hummed a tiny tune. Unbidden, her lips moved ever so slightly, shaping half-remembered words, staccato consonants, vowels that rubbed against them like oily fish in the net. "Mondradd in Mon," she crooned. "Borabd orá perdó." Words flowed, dancing within the tune, never repeating themselves, yet always almost the same. "Merdrabd or vern," she sang. "Arfaht ará camdó."
She dipped the feather in still water. How had she gotten to the spring? She didn't remember walking. With the wet feather, she dribbled a pattern on white limestone that was bare of moss. A beak, and wings. A long, long tail that seemed green, rust, and blue, but mostly green.
"Magpie fly," she sang, "Magpie chatter. Where will the road go . . . and does it matter?" Silly words, she thought. What do magpies know of roads? She tossed the feather, and it fell upon the stone. Feeling dizzy, Pierrette shut her eyes, and raised an arm to steady herselfyet she found no support. She fell . . .
She fell, and fell, and at last spread her wings. With a thump of speeding air brought up short, she swept upward, her tiny body teetering on long feather-clad wings, her tail streaming stiffly behind, trembling in the rush of fluid air that buoyed her. Below, vast black hills spread, and past a wingtip was the sea. A dull, leaden sea, no sunlight upon it.
Pierrette the girl would have felt a sudden chill, though Pierrette the magpie did not. What land lay below? Where were the trees, the open sea, the sun? No clouds billowed or promised rain. The sky and sea were dull as old, musty cloth.
Where was Ma? Where was Citharista?
As if someone . . . something . . . heard her silent plea, she found, along the brown, unlit coast, several familiar narrow bays. At the head of one, she saw great, spidery towers that concealed the waters beneath them: Citharista, seen with magpie's eyes. She recognized it from the distinctive shape of the Eagle's Beak.
Yet it was unlike the town she knew. The towers were topped with wheels threaded with ropes like ships' rigging, brown and orange as rust. The towers themselves were built of spidery timbers. Beyond were dark, windowless stone boxes high as the cliffs of the Eagle's Beak, that pushed out into the sea beyond the last wide, black road. Of the red-rock fortress that crowned the Beak there was no trace. Below the cliffs, waves thick as honey oozed over the rubble.
Her magpie's eyes traced dark lines eastward and north. Roads with no carts, donkeys, or men's feet upon them. Gaunt walls of broken houses large as Citharista's forum marched up steep hillsides where trees should have grown.
Where the valley grew narrow, she spotted a glitter of water, as if a single sunbeam had momentarily broken through the moss-thick sky. Magpie eyes marked the spot. Magpie wings tilted her toward it.
She landed in a rattle of stiff feathers upon the rotted shell of a great tree. Devoid of bark, it retained a hint of muscular texture that proclaimed it to have once been a beech.
Pierrette trembled. With hands no longer wings she reached down and lifted a tiny green feather, the only color that brightened the dead landscape.
Beyond an oily swirl of water that stank of dead things, her father should have lain asleep, but only bare rock the color of old bones protruded from powdery ash.
Sinking onto sooty dust that should have been crinkly leaves, she covered her face with her hands. Dry, wracking sobs shook her shoulders.
Beech leaves rustled. Leaves fell upon her dark hair. Amazed, she peeked through dampened fingers.
Spread before her was a wrinkled brown cloth, homespun, with patches where it had been torn, or where wool-worms had eaten it. A skirt . . . and within it, legs. Her gaze moved upward.
Odd, fey blue eyes, much like her own, gazed sadly. "Pierrette." The voice was like hers, too. "My little stone."
If Pierrette had known what madness was, she would then have thought herself so. In her relief, delivered from her magpie-dream, she didn't question the strange woman, or note that their two voices had not awakened her father, or that the woman knelt exactly where the smallest beech tree should have been, but was not.
"It was a terrible place," Pierrette whispered. "All dead, and I was lost."
"It's well you were afraid, my child," the woman said, in words neither Roman nor common speech, but clear to Pierrette. "Terrible it isand worse, it's not entirely dead. Evil reigns there, and the living howl in torment unending. You saw a place of tears and wailing, where laughter is unknown."
"Don't send me back," Pierrette pleaded.
"The spell you spoke sent you, not I." The woman's brow furrowed. "Do not seek to see aheador else endure again what you saw."
"But I don't know any spells."
"You know enough. I sang the words when you suckled at my breast. How else could I leave them for you? I, unlike you, didn't learn to write on wooden boards or the skins of sheep."
"I don't understand," Pierrette said, almost weeping.
"Oh, child! Remember this: When your confusion gives no peace, when the questions burn and will not be answered, seek the mage Anselm in his fortress, as I once bade you. I taught you what I could with my milk and lullabies. I've nothing to teach you now, that you don't already know."
The woman shook her head, jostling long, black locks as laden with dry leaves as Pierrette's own. "Come, child, finish your nap. See? The sun has not moved. There's still time." She smiled. "Yes, there's still time." She guided Pierrette's head to her lap, stroking leaves from her hair. "But time is not so sure of itself as the gods might think."
Pierrette slept.
When she awakened, her father also stretched, with a mighty sigh. He glanced at her and saw nothing amissa small girl nestled in a heap of leaves, beneath a small beech tree hardly as tall as himself.
"You didn't breathe the dust from those, did you?" Gilles indicated the fat mushrooms ringing the tree. "That kind is poison." That kind, he reflected, your mother gathered, and ate. Elen said they helped her grow wings like a magpie, and fly so high that the days of yore were visible as far as the veil of night.
"I didn't breathe the dust," she said truthfully.
Her father turned away. "We must go, or spend the night here. See how the sun has flown?"
Pierrette glanced toward the sun, far to the west now. Its glare wiped away the image of a ring of mushrooms, incomplete, and turned-up moss where one had been plucked from the ground.
She brushed pale crumbs from one corner of her mouth, then glanced again at the small beech tree. "I'll see you again, Mother," she said. Though her words were strange and staccato, they were yet slick as fish scales.
"What's that?" Gilles said, startled. "What did you say?"
"Nothing, Father. The words of a song. I don't remember where I heard them."
Gilles was silent. He didn't speak the tongue of the most ancient folk, but he had heard it on Elen's lips.
Hiking home through darkening hills, Pierrette tried to understand. One long-unasked question had been answered. Her mother's body had never been found, so there was no grave. When she asked P'er Otho where her mother was, he said, "I don't know." Had it been anyone but Elen, he might have said, "In heaven."
Now Pierrette knew, and would not have to ask.
"Goodnight, Mother," she whispered.