Pierrette's Journal
In the years since my mother's death at the hands of the Citharistans, I have learned the Church's Latin, Greek, and the language of Minho of Thera, long forgotten, yet rich in magical incantations. All are here, in Anselm's books.
I am obsessed with visions and auguries, magics to pierce the veil of time. Perhaps I am simply impressed with Anselm's claim to have been alive since Rome was a cluster of huts. Perhaps, seeing my mother's face in the full moon, I fear having my life shattered because I was unprepared.
I know a few spells, like "Guihen's Deception," the one my mother cast to hide herself. In the oldest tales, Guihen the Ligure used it to win a governorship, a Roman castra, and a rich, pretty wife. I have studied the Guihen tales' many variations, and I am not sure what they portend. Guihen the Ligure, a wood-sprite of my mother's lineage, has become in some devout households a Christian boy, the stone fort he governed a kingdom, and his pretty Roman wife the daughter of a Frankish lord. How many such changes can his spell endure? When the Guihen of ancient times is entirely transformed into Guihen the altar boy, will the spell become a prayer to the Christian God?
Anselm says few spells give the results the books claim. "Plead for manna," he says, "and you will be lucky not to be buried in poisonous toads." He complains of the inconstancy of magic, but I have no such complaint; with unfailing constancy all my divinations are of one place, one future, a dark time when all the gods and demons have been consumed, and mankind is enthralled within a great Evil that allows no magics at all.
I have dreamed of that dark time forty-three times since I came here to Eagle Cape. In my latest vision I knelt in water that reeked of rot and death, and peered over a heap of rubbish across a great flat plain of stone. The refuse stank, and glowed with sickly hues. No stinging insects swarmed, no frogs croaked; none could live in the poisonous water.
Across the plain, eldrich lights shifted like lusterless moonbeams, and huge demon-shapes growled and grumbled.
"Now it will come," said a voice I seemed to know. A hand took my wrist and drew me down into the foul water. The cold glow reached out like a stabbing sword. Baleful eyes big as platters sought me where I hid, and demonic roars battered my ears. I wanted to run.
"Wait! Watch!" my unseen companion commanded. The roar became shrill. It was upon us! I buried my head in my arms and felt its breath in my sodden hair. I could not look up even when the demon's voice fell off into the distance behind me, diminishing, like summer thunder that brings no rain. Yet I still breathed. The demon had leaped over me. I was not consumed by its fiery breath.
"Take me from this place," I begged the spirit I had invoked. "I want to wash away this filth." I envisioned the cold freshness of the pool of Ma.
A voice bitter as untimely death snarled: "This is the Mother's breast!"
Awake, I am not sure that the visions portray the future, though that is what I seek when I cast herbs on the fire or peer at glistening entrails. Could Evil could so entirely vanquish Good? Would not a world so lacking in beauty and goodness destroy itself in one vast spasm of hatred and horror, or drown in its own foul flood?
When I awakened, I crawled beneath Anselm's plump feathery coverlet, and took what comfort I could from the negligible warmth of his old bones. Perhaps he misunderstood. Though my breasts are small, I am no longer a child, and he suggested I reconsider my intention to remain virginal, and seek a loversome shepherd boy who does not know me as the boy Piers. I will not do so. I wish to remain virgin as huntress Diana, which my mother did not. I wish to become . . . a sorceress.
Sometimes my dreams were pleasant, when I visited the Golden Man at the end of the undiscovered calanque. We ate mussels steamed in seaweed, tossing the shells on the great heap that had accumulated there. Still I had not held him, or even touched him. I often wanted to, but one does not dictate the terms of dreams.
By Marie's fourteenth summer, her breasts and hips swelled to womanhood. She and Bertrand approached Father Otho for instruction in the mysteries of marriage. Pierrette was quite happy for her. Even though Marie would move out of the house someday, and Pierrette would have no one to whisper with when the darkness was thick and close, she was (so she told herself) outgrowing such childish needs. Their deep friendship would endure. Nothing could change that.
That night Pierrette and Marie lay whispering and giggling. "P'er Otho was so funny," Marie said, wrinkling her face like a dried fig. "When he spoke of the `marriage bed,' he became red as a pomegranate. `The marriage bed,' he said, `is joyous.' He kept saying things like thatthe `marriage bed' this, the `marriage bed' thatas if he was not speaking of me, or of Bertrand, but only of some for-nick-ating bed."
Both girls laughed, imagining the impersonal "marriage bed," all by itself, fulfilling God's plan, bouncing and jouncing with no one in it. "Poor P'er Otho," Pierrette said. "What does he know of such things?" Neither knew what carnal memories Otho cherished, of a time before either of them was conceived, or whose lovely face and small breasts came to mind when he thought his hidden thoughts.
Pierrette could not imagine being kissed by Bertrand, but was not immune to the generalized attraction of such things. . . .
Only the week before, hearing a soft cry that had not sounded like boys swordfighting with wooden sticks, she had slipped through the crumbled portal in the marketplace. There she saw Marius lying with the baker Claudia's daughter, Marcella.
Marcella's skirt was bunched up around her waist, and Marius's hand covered her dark fluff. He rhythmically rubbed his trouser-clad midsection against her plump thigh. She arched up against his hand, emitting little squeaks.
Pierrette turned away, burning with ill-defined emotion. It should have been her with Marius, not Marcella. Yet it looked ridiculous, uncomfortable, even disgusting. She was glad Marius did not want to do that with her. But why would he? She was not even a girl, to Marius. That made her angrier still.
Marius saw her. "What are you looking at, Piers?" he growled. "Go find your own girl."
Marcella tugged her skirt down. "Yes!" she snapped. "A little girl!"
Humiliated, Pierrette withdrew. Days later, the memory burned still, augmented by a fresher one: she had blushed, and whispered to Marie. "Do you ever . . . touch yourself . . . down there?" she asked.
Marie answered with a giggle and a mischievous leer.
The next morning, a Sunday, Pierrette would ordinarily have gone to the Eagle's Beak, and spent long days studying with Anselm. He had introduced her to the nine Saracen numerals and the strange symbol that meant "one less than one." Once she had memorized the characters and the simple rules for combining them, she was able to count to one hundred with ease. Now she really knew what a "century" was.
Yet the questions that burned in her head did not concern numbers. Anselm's suggestion, recorded in her diary in letters of lampblack and oil, did little to ease her mind. She intended to remain a virgin, as Ma insisted. Why had he suggested otherwise? Had he felt manly stirrings? Had he pushed her away so she would not tempt him to use up his dwindling magic by making himself young for a night? Or was it simply that if she gave up her claim to the Virgin Goddess's beneficence, she would cease to importune him to teach her magical spells?
She could not go to Anselm feeling as she did. Instead, she turned eastward and onto the path to the Roman fountainand beyond.
Pierrette did not eat the fungi that ringed the small beech tree. She did not wish to fly as a magpie or peer into future time. She needed to talk to someone who would not laugh at her childish ideas. She wanted her mother.
She may have dozed. When she jerked her head up, the woman of the spring was there, dressed in brown homespun the color of dry leaves, but she was not old, except for crinkles at the corners of her eyes, and minuscule grooves between her dark eyebrows, that hinted at suffering.
She put her slender arm around Pierrette's shoulders. "You're far too young for such a troubled face."
Pierrette told her how Anselm had pushed her away, and what had happened behind the marketplace, and how those things made her feel.
"Perhaps Gilles's deception, fooling people to think you are a boy, is not so bad," the woman mused. Something in the way she said "Gilles" alerted Pierrettewarmth and amused condescension, the way Pierrette herself might say "Marie" when her sister was being silly.
This was not just the woman of the spring, Pierrette decided. This was truly . . . Elen. She sighed, and settled against her, smelling old wool, the ozone tang of windblown hair, and the musky aroma of a woman's skin.
"As Piers, you are less temptingand less temptedthan Pierrette would be," Elen said. "Gilles has made it easier for you to remain virgin. I was not so lucky."
"Do you wish you had not married, Maman?"
"Oh, child, how can I answer? Had I done so, I would not have you. Yet had I not, I might have done what needs doing, and not left you to bear that burden."
"What must I do?"
"If I knew, I would tell you. You'll know. Until then, enjoy what you haveyour father and sister and P'er Otho, and . . ." Her words dwindled, as if she regretted themand regretted all that she herself had lost.
"I'm twelve, Mother," Pierrette said. "I'm no longer a child. At least . . . I should not be."
Elen laughed softly. "That? Never wish for that, little stone. The moon does not command you. You won't suffer its pull until you have abandoned your questor have completed it."
Pierrette was overwhelmed with troubling thoughts, but was afraid to destroy the moment by voicing them. When she finally drew breath to speak, it was too late. She was alone. It was afternoon. The little tree was again just a tree, and her mother's voice was only the soughing of a soft breeze in leaves and branches far overhead.
Pierrette trudged back through Citharistaand beyond it. She was tired and her feet were sore, but she pressed on toward the cape. It was always impossible to predict, from the course of the sun or stars "outside" what it would be "inside." She did not think the old man himself knewhe just declared it "night" whenever he felt need of a napand that made it so. She hoped that when she got there she could sleep, and not speak with Anselm until she had rested.
Crossing the natural stone bridge, all that remained of the old roadway, she noticed that another chunk had fallen from the span, leaving a raw, red scar. What would happen when the rest fell, leaving the gate a mere hole in a bare cliff, impossible to enter by? Would Anselm starve, without bread and oil, when the last of his magic died?
"I must find out why the magics have changed. I don't want to lose another person I love."
Her first opportunity had not long to wait. Anselm (who was not sleepy, and did not give Pierrette time to rest) wished to teach her a whole new way of looking at the world.
"Geometry!" he announced. "You'll be able to measure the height of a tree, a cliff . . . the moon and stars themselves . . . without lifting your pretty little bottom from your bench."
Pierrette was not sure how she felt about such allusions to her body. She was pleased that Anselm was aware she was a girl, almost a woman, and was flattered to be called "pretty," "delectable," even "succulent"which sounded grown-up and slightly dangerous. But Anselm's words stirred uneasy feelings she did not wish to acknowledge; had she read Ovid, or certain lascivious Saracen writers, she would have called them erotic. She had spent more years inside the keep than outside, but was less comfortable with womanly things than any other girl her physical age would be.
Anselm did not press his unconscious suit beyond occasional words; it was easy enough to let them pass unremarked. Besides, his enthusiasm for his main topic was contagious. "We start with a point," he was saying, "a spot that has no size, only position."
"Like zero!" Pierrette blurted.
Anselm looked strangely at her. "I never thought of that," he remarked. He made a charcoal-dot on her smooth board. "That is a point." He made another. "Another point," he said. "Now what have we?"
"Two points."
"That's not what I meant," he said, annoyed. "What is between the points?"
Pierrette stared at the two dots, but saw nothing.
"Well then, how many points can I fit between those dots?"
Pierrette almost said, "About fifty," after estimating the size of the dots, but instead asked a question. "The dots have no size? I mean, your dots only symbolize much smaller dots? Infinitely small ones?" He nodded.
She had only heard the words "infinite" and "eternal" a week before, and the conceptsforeverness, something without limits, a whole universe of tiny, perfectly real numbers all crowded between zero and onemade her head spin.
"Then," she said, "there are an infinite number of . . . of points." Only fifty dots or so, but an infinity of tiny, sizeless points. She took the charred grapevine and drew all the points at once, with one sweep of her hand. "There they all are," she said. "All infinity of them."
Anselm drew her from her chair, then capered around her room, holding her hands and pulling her along. "You're brilliant," he said. "You understand."
Of course she did. It was self-evident, once you knew about zero and infinity.
"Nowwhat is that?" Anselm asked, leaning on the table, panting, pointing between the two original dots.
"It is an infinity of . . . no, it is . . . a line. A line of points."
"Exactly!" he blurted. "And this?" He took the charcoalwhich broke in his handand made two more dots. She said it was both two dots, an infinity of invisible dots, and also a line.
"A postulate!" he crowed. "Two points define a line. Now three points, like this . . ."
"Three linesa triangle . . . and three infinities of dots . . . can there be three infinities?"
"You may have as many as you want, child. An infinity of infinities."
Pierrette's first geometry lesson was off to a grand start. The core of what she learned that first day was less obvious to Anselm than to her: that all knowledge and understanding is related. Not just zero, learned in one context, and dimensionless points in another; every fact, every possible observation, was linked in some way to every other.
Over several working and sleeping periods she learned how postulatesinitial assumptions like the existence of pointscould be combined, and manipulated into proofs or theorems, grander statements of derived reality. "Kewayday!" she exclaimed when she had proven, to Anselm's satisfaction, the number of points required to define a circle.
"What?" he blurted.
"Kewayday. Quod erat demonstrandum," she said. "That is like `amen' at the end of a prayer, or `abarakat' after a magical spell."
"Bah! What makes you think so? Nonsense! This is a logical proof, not a prayer or . . . or a spell." He eyed her suspiciously. "Have you been dabbling with prayers? Spells?"
"Only those my mother left me," she replied, "and I haven't `dabbled.' I studied them and wrote them down."
"Well, cease doing so. They won't work right, and you'll get hurt."
"Prayers and spells and mathematical theorems aren't so different," she mused. "I'm not sure they're not exactly the same."
"Nonsense! Have you been eating mushrooms? If you're going to waste time with crazy daydreams, do so in your father's grove. I'm trying to teach you worthwhile things."
Pierrette did not bring the subject up again, but she did not stop thinking about it. The geometry of Euclid seemed little different than well-written incantations.
When she progressed into trigonometry, she upset Anselm no end. "The sum of the angles of a triangle," she said one day, "must be at least 180 degrees."
"At least? That's wrong. The sum of a triangle's included angles is always 180 degrees. No more, no less."
"It's immutable? Just like magic, Master? Is that what you mean?"
"It is not! I mean that if a geometric postulate changed, everything that proceeded from it would also, and the proofs would have to be redone, with new conclusions. That's nonsense. The universe would fall apart."
"That's what I mean," Pierrette insisted, carefully forming her argument as did philosophers in books. "Just as a difference in one basic tenet of a faithas bishop Arius discoveredcan create two faiths at war with each other, so one change in a magical premise can create two kinds of magic, in which identical spells produce entirely different results."
"Bah! Nonsense! Unicorn feathers." Anselm was so angry he sprayed spittle on her charcoal-board and on smooth linen paper she used for her final copies of theorems. "Religions are not magics are not geometry."
"I can show you triangles with more than 180 degrees, Master," she said, very quietly.
"Good! And I will show you a four-legged chicken."
"I mean it. Will you let me show you my proof?"
Anselm eyed her suspiciously, alerted more by her ominously quiet voice than had she bellowed as he did. He nodded.
"I have prepared my proof in the tall courtyard." The tall court was a light-well between the east wall of the keep and Anselm's library. At one time he had experimented with pendulums, and a great basalt ball still rested there, its rope rotted. Pierrette picked up a lump of chalky limestone and proceeded to demonstrate, on the surface of that ball, how a triangle, when projected onto a sphere instead of a flat surface, did not have precisely 180 degrees among its internal angles, but always at least 180. She then proffered several pages upon which she had written the theorem proving her contentionwhich he brushed angrily aside.
"That's cheating!" Anselm expostulated. "A special case of no practical value doesn't change the fact that a plane triangle has 180 degrees." That, of course, was the flaw in Pierrette's case. She had not shaken the foundations of the universe by changing an essential premise. Anselm praised her cleverness, but did not accept what she intuitively knew to be true.
-
Pierrette's Journal
Someday I will devise a theorem based on postulates of magic. I will leave those based in Faith to priestly theologians. Anselm will never accept my proof, but if I show him results, perhaps I can save him from the fate he foresees, as he fades slowly, and his keep crumbles into the sea.
I have had small successes. My mother's magics can be expressed thus:
I. There are four elements: Earth, Air, Fire, and
Water.
II. Each element is absolutely different from each
other one.
Those are postulates. It is easy to see that a change in one would change any spell that depended upon themand I have found such a change. Because of it, no spell that depends on the second postulate works as intended. These are my new postulates, that reflect a changed reality:
I. There are four elements: Earth, Air, Fire, and
Water. (This is unchanged.)
II. Two elements are fluid at all timesAir and Fire.
III. Earth and Water can be solid or fluid. (I have
never seen molten rock, but I know of it.)
IV. Fluidity has two substates, liquid and vapor.
In Anselm's workshop (though not when he was awake) I condensed fire in a bowl and bottled it in glass. It lights this page as I write. I captured a raindrop and induced it to become a diamond that I wear around my neck. Those spells are so simple I hardly need to write them to remember them.
I suspect that the spell that holds the sun at midday is based in some fundamental premise, yet undiscovered, that remains unchanged, and that the failing of the spell that kept Anselm young has, somewhere in its written lines, a premise that no longer reflects the universe as it is.
I cannot stop my master's decline, because he will not allow me to search his magics for the flawed assumptions within each failed spell. He does not have forever. Somewhere, an infinity has been assumed where a zero exists. Did Anselm's aging begin with the discovery of zero, when something that had been infinitely small suddenly ceased to exist?
-
Pierrette shuddered, and put down her pen. She often scared herself, as though the floor her bench rested upon might not be solid, and she might fall through tile, earth, and bedrock when some hitherto stable premise changed: when a word in some ancient prayer was replaced by another, and some god heard, and did something new.
It was late. She had drawn the curtain because she preferred to write dark thoughts by the glow of liquid fire in the blue glass bottle. It reminded her that the universe was not truly out of control, only changing, and that understanding was the way to confront change.
She draped a scarf over the bottle and, because she wished to visit the oubliette before sleeping, lit an oil lamp with the flick of a fingertip. Smiling as the tiny spark took hold, she went out into the dark, unwindowed corridor.