The young sorceress found most things in Citharista unchanged, but not everything. The mage Anselm and the Episkopos Theodosius still rant and remonstrate, but I have little fear that the good bishop will mention his ultimatum again. One night, in his cups, he confided that were Anselm to weaken and allow himself to be baptized, the first thing Theodosius would do would be to excommunicate him, so they would still have something to argue about.
One change troubled her deeply, for a while. "I haven't seen Cletus about," she remarked to me, one day soon after her return.
"Who?" I asked. There had once been a Father Cletus in Massalia, but to Pierrette's dismay, I remembered no boy of that name, nor was there a house on the spot where she thought he had lived, only old foundation stones.
"I have destroyed him," she wailed. "He was never born." She was inconsolable. I pointed out that her own arguments about the nature of time made that unlikely. "He is merely somewhere else. In Arelate, perhaps, or some small village down the coast." At last she accepted my argument, I think, because the burden of not doing so was too heavy to bear.
"The young knight Diodoré is alive and well in Aquae Sextiae," I remarked. "Bishop Theodosius speaks of him with great affectionbut he has never been here in Citharista, as you say he once was, and thus he never fell in love with you."
She agreed that her life was easier that way. I did not probe deeper then, because though Pierrette is outwardly content, she has lost more than most people ever haveher entire world. Though its replacement is not much different, she can't help but wonder if even her father and I, and Anselm, are really the same people who watched her grow from a frightened, defiant child to the woman she has becomeand is still becoming.
The "serpent's egg" hangs always between her shapely breasts. If it is home to the soul of a man centuries dead, I cannot confirm itnor deny it. "Cunotar cannot depart yet," Pierrette says. "He still has a task he must perform." What is his task? She says she will know, when the time is right. I hope I am not there, when that time comes.
She spends many of her days up the narrow valley, beyond the Roman fountain, now dry, where beech trees grow and sweet water bubbles out of the earth. At night she returns to guide her wine-befuddled master Anselm home from the tavern to his lofty bedroom high above the town.
She is perhaps less afraid, in this world, than in the one she lost, because if there is a message or an omen concealed in the foregoing tale, it is that though the Black Time still looms, and Christians (perhaps wiser than I, but less informed) still separate the small mysteries of this harsh, beautiful land into Christian good and pagan evil, its coming is only one possibility, because history is as mutable as the course of a stream damned by a rock.
Of courseas Pierrette insisted I say hereevents, like streams, tend to find again their natural course when a way around an obstacle is discovered. She insists that the unchanged history of Marius, his canal, and his battles, proves this, and proves as well that the Black Time will not easily be thwarted.
The tale just told is thus, she insists, only the righting of a singular wrongness, a skirmish in the unending war against the Eater of Gods, because the original source of the imbalance between good and evil, that allowed him to come into existence, has not yet been found. But for now the enemy has suffered a defeat, and no Gaulish fantômes tread the bridges and byways of Provence. Olive trees bear olives, not grapes, and no one remembers a time when it might have been different.
Otho, Bishop of Nemausus
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