Citharista enjoyed a summer of peace. Provence rested between the bouts of devastation that kept its population low, its valleys untilled.
No shark-sailed Saracen vessels ranged the rough seacoast. The Franks ruled from their damp northern cities, and the Church sent bishops to tend men's souls. But neither Franks nor Church bought goods or traded. No Frankish silver marks wended their way south, and no Moorish solidii, minted to the full Roman measure, found their way to Citharista.
The trading cities of Arelate and Avennio lay devastated, their bid to keep Mediterranean trade alive by alliance with the Moors overthrown by Frankish Carolus's brutal conquest.
Elsewherein the crowded ports of Sicilia, the Levant, and the African coast, ships offloaded Egyptian cotton, gold from Senegal, fine horses from Andalusia. But without trade, outlets for Provence's figs, apples, wine, and salt were gone. Salt pans in the Camargue lay untended, until spring floods claimed them. Men worked their groves and vineyards, harvesting enough for local trade alone.
The land was at peace, but Pierrette was not. Even years later, she would speak uneasily of the dream-within-a-dream that haunted her. Raucous magpies taunted her by day, and visions of a dead future tormented her nights.
Otho, Bishop of Nemausus
The Sorceress's Tale
"Your soul wanders because you remain unbaptized," said Father Otho, when she told him of her torment.
"I'm afraid of magic." She sounded wise and old.
The priest had an eerie sense of having sat on the half-fallen stone wall in another time, of having the same conversation with someone much like Pierrette, many years before, and with no more success.
"The rite is not magic," Otho wanted to say, but he kept silent. He knew he was right, but couldn't explain it, even to himself, and as he had failed to convince Elen, so he feared to fail with her daughter.
Gilles also knew no peace. Branches fell from his olive trees, and when he poked and pried at the dead wood, white grubs and black beetles tumbled in a dismaying rain. One tree, an old one named Pelos, put forth a final meager crop, then died. The other trees were miserly as well, and one day the Burgundian knight Jerome visited Gilles in the grove, eyeing the sickly trees with ill-concealed scorn.
"What a shame." Jerome tugged at a branch that had kept only a few forlorn leaves. "Such a grove is too much work for one old man and your little Piers. You need someone strong to maintain it."
Gilles, with sinking heart, knew the German's desire. The grove had been in his family beyond recall. A Greek ancestor had planted some of the first trees; a Roman one had expanded it and built around it the now-falling limestone wall. Conquering Goths left the grove in his family's hands, claiming only the first pressing of oil as their due, recognizing that the trees didn't love them as they did Gilles's ancestors.
Now a Burgundian lord held a throne in Aquae Sextius, in fee from the Frankish king. His vassal Jerome ruled Citharistaa light yoke for the villagers to bear, as Jerome's horsemen gave security in return. No brigands or bands of homeless soldiers raided Citharista. Yet in the new order, slaves often prospered more than free men.
Gilles was a free landowner, yet he was poor. His neighbor Jules, whose forefathers had been senators of Rome itself, was nominally Jerome's slave. Yet Jules prospered, and Gilles did not. Jules had sold his trees, his sons, his wife, and himself, to the Burgundian, in exchange for Jerome's soldiers' help at harvesttime and a promise that he and his family would never go hungry. Now Jules wore white linen, and Gilles contented himself with an old homespun shirt.
If Gilles pledged himself to Jerome, and sold his grove for a silver mark or two, he too might prosper. Yet he balked. "It's only evil winds," he told the knight. "Next year they'll be warmer. Then there'll be no rot in the crotches of my trees."
"Next year you'll have no crop." Jerome dangled a small purse. "This would tide you over."
"I will think on it," Gilles said grudgingly.
But he thought instead that the grove had once flourished with little labor on his part, that the trees, for all their thick-trunked age, had given fruit so full of oil that even the final pressing was rich, green, and sweet.
But in those times, he'd had Elen.
He'd pretended not to notice when she had crept from their bed. Once, only once, he followed her, and saw her toss off her night-shift at the edge of the grove. With a fascination almost erotic, he watched her glide gracefully, entirely nude, from tree to tree, embracing this one and that as if they were lovers, gnarled old men, yet not without dark, woody desire.
Gilles understood why the grove no longer flourished. Only a week before, he had found cloth-wrapped herbs in a rotted crotcha bundle dark with years of decay. Elen's magic. No harvest aid from Jerome would restore his trees.
Pierrette overheard Gilles speak with the knight. Losing his trees would kill her father; he was far more devoted to them than to his boat and nets.
She, too, felt the tie to his small patch of land, fine, rooty tendrils that reached from her most remote ancestors to wind themselves about her heart.
How could she allow harsh-tongued foreigners to harvest her trees? She gritted her teeth and strode away.
Her steps took her along the harbor toward the cape. Guihen had warned her of risks beyond that dark gateway, but . . . Her mother had bade her do so. She weighed choices as if they were pebbles and her mind a balance scale. Mother said that when Pierrette's confusion gave her no peace, the mage Anselm could give her solace. Hadn't she? Was it solace, or was it knowledge Elen promised?
A breeze sprang up, cooling her forehead. Pale leaves of a wild olive flickered with dappled sunlight.
"Guihen?" she whispered uneasily. Quickly as it had arisen, the wind died.
Guihen had warned she would be denied husband, home, children if she went to Anselm the mage. Yet if Gilles lost the olive grove, what would she, in turn, have to pass to her children? If Gilles allowed himself the security of servitude, then she, her children and their children, would be servii.
She looked down on the town. Was the Golden Man of her dreams part of the future she would be denied?
Her child's reasoning was not clear like P'er Otho's; her weighing of choices was not exact. Hers was a battle of facts and emotions, not sedate debate: Guihen's voice and her mother's, arguing inside her head.
She clenched her fist. There was no way to decide.
Her vacillating footsteps took her to a path that led into the high, thin forest above the cape. The rough terrain gave her only one choice: retrace her steps, or continue on and perhaps become lost.
"Come," a faint zephyr breathed.
"Guihen? Is that you?" There was no reply. Pierrette pressed on. The air was sullen and still, its silence portentous.
Between two white limestone slabs she stepped on a low, grasslike growth, and a sharp spiciness wafted up from the crushed plant. Rosemary. She plucked the damaged sprig, recalling the rich melange of similar scents from the wooden box in the cellar.
The tiny leaves rustled. "Now you understand . . ."
Her heart thumping as if she had run a great distance, she tucked the sprig in the waist of her boy's pants, and climbed farther. From the stump of a long-dead oak she scraped red-brown fungus into a little sack made from the hem of her shirt.
Cheerily now, she hummed a strange little tune as she tapped yellow pollen from white starflower blossoms, and plucked dry, brown petals and swelling, reddening hips from a tangled rose.
It was as if the odd words and melody came from somewhere outside herself. As if it were her mother's voice, not Guihen's, not hers. With newfound resolve, she set foot on the faint trail back to Citharista and her father's grove.
The eighth winter of Pierrette's short life promised to be severe, and she was grateful for the fat bundles of dead branches she and Gilles gathered in the olive grove.
"Wait, Father," she protested, as Gilles fingered a promising branch. "That one may not be dead."
Her father examined the tips of the twig, looking for the first swelling buds of midwinter. "Not a single new bud on the tree." His tone was bleak. "If I had a good axe, I'd split the trunk for firewood."
"We don't need that much wood, Father. The nights are less cold than a week ago." She needed time for what she'd done to have its effect. Too weary to argue, Gilles shrugged and climbed down from the tree.
Spring came, and winds no longer blew bitter in the mountain valleys. The few clouds were high and puffy, and under the strengthening sun the ground dried.
Gilles and Pierrette surveyed the grove. "You were right," he crowed, cradling a leafy branch in both hands. "The tree lives! Look at those buds. Next year, we'll harvest a whole basketful from this branch alone." Olives do not bloom or put forth fruit every year. This year's rich foliage held a promise of something more.
As they walked home, Gilles rehearsed to his daughter how he'd rebuff Jerome the Burgundian when he came again to buy the grove. Pierrette, never really talkative, said little. Gilles saw nothing unusual in that.
Gilles's good cheer stemmed not only from the tree's rebirth, but from the shattering of a belief he had held for several seasons now: that the grove's decline began with the death of his wife, and that it was irreversible. Now he could speak with true conviction when he told Jerome that its ailment had been only a fluke of the weather.
The summer passed slowly.
At the marketplace, Marie's preferred spot to sell pots of last year's olives and jars of oil was at the end of the stone-paved square, where the columns of the Romans' forum shaded the cobblestones from the afternoon sun.
Behind the crumbling brick arches was a weedy open space, from which issued a wooden clatter. "They're swordfighting again," Pierrette said. "I'm going to watch." Marie, who seemed to have no interest in anything except olives and oil, shrugged.
Pierrette wasin the eyes of the gensa boy, Gilles's son Piers, so it was only natural that she should gravitate toward boyish things. As a girl, albeit disguised, she considered boys pretentious little imitations of men, who puffed and postured in a manner she could not imitate without an inward laugh.
Her ready smile served a purpose: the genuine boysmost of whom were taller than she wasseldom pressed her hard. Her thin arms were hardly capable of wielding even a wooden sword, should she be invited into the game. She was neither a leader nor a scapegoat. As if by some unremarked magic, she was never really noticed at all, unless she made a point of it.
She peered through an irregular doorway. Of the boys with wooden blades, she only had eyes for one: Marius, whose father owned the largest boat at the wharf. He was tall, with curly hair and a long, straight nose. Older and half again her height, he seemed manly and mature. As always, he was getting the best of his opponent.
"When I marry," Pierrette promised herself, "it will be to Marius." Then her face twisted. She would marry no one. She was, as far as they all knew, a weak, ineffectual boy.
When, if ever, could she reveal herself as a girl? Would she ever get over the teasing, the laughter, when the townsfolk learned her secret?
Avoiding Marie's notice, she slipped down a narrow street, and away from the market. How unfair life was. Marie, who didn't care whether boys noticed her or not, drew their attention with her quiet, indifferent gaze, her ethereal smiles and downcast eyes.
The street opened onto the empty place between the last houses and the half-fallen town wall. Pierrette gazed outward and upwardto the three domelike rocks that formed the Eagle's Beak. Guihen, on those very heights, had warned her away from Anselm.
But what difference would that make? She had no real friends and no prospect of a husband, anyway. Why not continue westward right now, to the mage Anselm's?
The long, upward trail daunted her, and it was past noonday. She let her steps take her instead to her father's flourishing grove. Best if she spoke with Gilles, make him let her end the charade, let her wear skirts and bind her hair with bright yarn or a ribbon. If they did it now, the boys might in time forget her father's deception.
She found Gilles under the tree he had believed dead. He stood, stiff as a crow-bane, his face immobile and pale, staring at a small, brown object in the palm of his hand.
Pierrette's steps slowed as if beneath her feet was sticky mud. A confrontation was at hand. Better here in the grove, she decided, than at home where Marie might hear.
Gilles stretched out his hand. She glanced indifferently at the twist of once-white cloth, stained where rain had soaked powdered leaves and burnt bone within. His glance was accusing, yet overlaid with something resembling grief. "You are too young for witchery. Who showed you?"
"Mother did."
"How? You were only five when . . ." He could not, even now, speak of Elen's death. "She sang words in the old tongue. Did she teach you those too?"
"She came in a dream. The spells were hidden in her lullabies."
"Dreams lie, child!" He swallowed, summoned his courage. "Have you been to the Eagle's Beak as well?"
"I can't go there. Guihen says . . ."
"Guihen?" Gilles's eyes widened. "Didn't Otho tell you such creatures are Satan's tricks? You risk your soul!"
"I don't know about souls. Only about olive trees, and powdered blood, and . . ."
"Don't tell me!" Gilles backed away, his eyes troubled. "P'er Otho says the nuns in Massalia will take lost children. That's where I'll take you."
"Those hags with long noses? They'd beat me." She saw the nuns as pale wraiths with red and knobby knees and harsh raven voices, haunting a windowless warren.
Her father seemed obdurate.
"Father," she coaxed, "who'll help with the harvest? All the treesall the olives . . ."
Gilles glanced uneasily toward his grove, realizing the reversal of his fortunes wasn't due to his skill as olivier, or to favorable weather. Elen had wandered among his trees, talking to them as if they were house cats or children. The little bundle in his hand was not the first such fetish he had seen. Pierrette, whether through innate talent or witchery from beyond the grave, had taken up Elen's task.
Gilles was freshly ashamed. He had risked and lost his wife for a rich crop and a male child, but he would not so use his daughter. "After the harvest," he mumbled. "I'll speak with P'er Otho. After the harvest feast, you'll go to the nunnery."
Despite his words, Pierrette knew she'd gained a respite. She would not be bundled off to Massalia in someone's oxcart, not right away. Yet she felt no joy, no victory. Silhouettes loomed across the harbor: the Eagle's Beak, and the mage Anselm's keep. "I should have gone there today," she whispered. "Perhaps the sorcerer might teach me to be wise."