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Chapter 17 - Changing Magics

"I'm not sure I believe you," he said, "but when we're safely inside, I'll introduce you to Kraton, who favors the Roman cause. He used to be a big man among the Gauls, but the dryadeae have pretty much discredited him."

Kraton, he explained, didn't think the Gauls could win against Roma. For a century, ever since the Battle of Telemon, Celts of every tribe had been defeated by Roman arms and Roman discipline. Why should Entremont be different? Kraton believed they should give the Romans the trade and military corridor along the coast that they wanted—ally with them, and get rich selling them the amber, furs, tin, and wheat that came down River Rhodanus. If nothing else, a treaty would give the Gauls time to unite. The Salyen League that held Entremont, comprised of several tribes, was a start, but unless the hundreds of Gaulish tribes got together, an army under one leader, they could not defeat Roma.

"But the dryadeaes' magic has given people hope," Guihen concluded. "Now Kraton and his family live in a hovel in the low town, in disgrace—so I don't know what he can do for you."

* * *

"Who comes?" growled an unseen guard at the gate above. Pierrette and Guihen were halfway up the rough staircase.

"Guihen, and a friend. Put your sword back in its sheath, Tomaros."

"Come out where I can see your ugly face, boy. Then I'll decide where to sheath what." Guihen laughed, as if at an old, familiar joke. Pierrette was disconcerted by what sounded like a sexual allusion—she thought she knew the Guihen of her day. Just how different was this Guihen? Different—or had the ages not yet passed all but obscured the early roots of the Guihen she knew?

The big, yellow-haired warrior passed them through into the southwesternmost corner of the low town. "Kraton won't be asleep yet," said Guihen. "Perhaps he'll let us rest on his floor."

"I'm not tired."

"I understand. But in this town, people don't go out after dark. I'm sure you know why."

"I think I know all too well. Will we be safe from whatever roams the night?"

"No one seems to notice me, unless I want them to. Perhaps I'm indeed learning some of the true magical skills you say I'll have someday."

"Perhaps so. Does Kraton have any chickens—perhaps a white hen?"

"A white hen?"

"Never mind. That's another story I haven't told yet."

* * *

Kraton's house in the low town was not that rude—no more so than Pierrette's father's two-room stone house. Nor was it crowded—the houses of Entremont were mostly two stories, with several rooms off an upstairs hallway that was gained by a stairway from the street.

Kraton was not in when they arrived, but his wife, Chiomara, welcomed Guihen and his friend. She was small for a Celt, and dark-haired, though shot now with gray. "My husband will be happy to meet you," she told Pierrette, "though the name Veleda will not endear you to the dryadeae."

Pierrette wondered why, and Chiomara seemed surprised she did not know. "A priestess of Veleda burned the nemeton of Heraclea ten years ago. The dryadeae say that if the Romans had attacked then, Heraclea would have fallen despite its new walls."

"Ten years ago?" Pierrette felt a sudden inner chill. Then this was not 127 B.C., but 124—and if Heraclea still stood, then history had already changed. What had gone wrong?

"You look pale. Here. Sit. I'll brew a restorative tea. Aurinia—bring the poor girl one of those honey cakes." Aurinia, Kraton's only unmarried daughter, was as golden as her name. Her unbound blond tresses swirled about her shoulders as she scurried to obey.

"Forgive me," Pierrette said. "Sometimes the burden of seeing ahead is confusing—when what is and what might have been swirl about in my head . . . I hope you won't think me mad if I ask you some strange questions. . . ."

* * *

Fulvius Flaccus had not, in this history, landed at the Rhodanus's mouth and captured Heraclea five years ago. He had come overland from the east instead, and had besieged Entremont. The pro-Roman faction led by Kraton reached an agreement with Flaccus short of abject surrender, and the legions departed, leaving only a garrison—and, of course, the usual flock of Roman, Phoenician, and Greek merchants who had followed in the legions' wake.

But the vergobret Teutomalos, the high magistrate of Entremont, gathered warriors and slew the garrison and many merchants. He formed a new council, composed entirely of his sycophants, acting upon the advice of a foreign dryade from the west country, who seemed to have him under a spell.

Then, less than a moon ago, the new consul, Calvinus, had fought his way up the Argentia and to Entremont . . . and so things stood.

How had she, Pierrette, arrived so much later than she had planned? She had passed through the fane, envisioning the Roman camp—a gridiron pattern of white tents. . . . Of course. She had not attempted to pass through to a specific time, but to a circumstance: a Roman camp new enough to have no permanent structures, only tents, a trench, and the wooden palisade. And that was now, not four years ago.

Pierrette tried to shrug off her despair when Aurinia brought small, heavy biscuits and tea that smelled of chamomile, lavender, and some vaguely familiar mint. She heard a baby crying, and Aurinia smiled. "Onomaris will be annoyed," she said. "The baby kept her up until moonset, and now he's waking at dawn." Onomaris was Kraton's eldest daughter. Overhead, Pierrette heard heavy, angry footsteps.

The door to the street swung open. "Aurinia! Go pacify your sister, will you?" A big man stood there. Then he saw Pierrette and Guihen. "What's this? How did such a skinny, big-eared fellow latch onto such a pretty girl?" His broad grin lifted the corners of his bushy gray mustache. Kraton. Despite his age, he was an imposing man, broad shouldered and with no trace of a bulge beneath his tightly belted tunic.

Chiomara patted the bench next to her. "Come, sit. Onomaris's breast has pacified the child already."

"And she's not my sister, father. The baby is my niece."

"I meant you to pacify Onomaris, not the baby," Kraton said. "I heard her stomping, all the way out in the street."

"How are things in the king's house?" his wife asked.

Kraton's jovial mood evaporated. He glanced from Pierrette to Guihen, who nodded. "The dryadeae tell him what he wants to hear—that we'll defeat the Romans; they will leave, and never come back, and he'll rule over a hundred united tribes. What can I offer him compared to that?"

"His soul!" Pierrette blurted.

Kraton eyed her speculatively. "What are you talking about?"

"I think you know. The dryadeae are playing with magics that far surpass what they have learned even in a Great Year of training. Who is teaching them—and why?"

"How can you know about this? Only Teutomalos and his cronies know what they're doing. They tell the rest of us only that it will insure our victory over the Romans."

"That you may," Pierrette agreed. "But all things have a price. If they have not told you how they will accomplish their end, I'll wager they haven't explained what it will cost, or how long it will take to be paid."

Kraton laughed, a humorless bark. "I'd not take that wager. But you are a stranger here—how do you know so much? How did you find out what they're doing up there?"

"This is the seeress Petra, a devotee of Veleda," said Guihen. "She was at Heraclea when the nemeton burned."

"I didn't tell you that. . . ."

"You didn't have to," Guihen said. "Now your expression confirms it. You are that seeress."

Kraton was dubious. "That was ten years ago, and you are no older than Aurinia. Perhaps we should begin at the beginning. . . . Aurinia—now please assist Onomaris with the baby." The blond girl looked as if she would protest, decided against it, and stalked out. "I haven't told the rest of the family what little I know, or have deduced," Kraton explained. "If we survive the Romans' siege, there'll be time enough for terrible dreams. Now tell me, seeress—what don't I know about this present nightmare?"

Pierrette told him, not exactly what the dryadeae were doing—which she did not know, for sure—but what the cost would be, to Kraton's generation and so many to follow, right down to the end of time. Kraton impressed her as no one's fool. He was a political man, not a dryade, yet he seemed to accept her incredible tale at face value—she had been born in a far future time, and had come back—twice, now—to set the course of events back on its proper path. "I am no seer," Kraton mused, "but even I can see that Roma and Gaul together can do great things. Roman discipline and Celtic brilliance would be a formidable combination, but this present consortium of Salyens, Vocontii, and Ligures is only a rabble held together by fear of Roma and worse—by their mutual complicity in perversion, the creation of unnatural fantômes."

So. He knew that much. But he had said unnatural fantômes. Pierrette realized that Kraton saw no harm in preserving the heads of honored Gaulish dead, or even those of noble enemies fairly slain—but her depiction of the slaughtered innocents in the valley north of Sainte Baume had shaken him.

"For hundreds of years," he mused, "even since Thales of Miletus, Greek thinkers have postulated a world where all that could be known would be, where all phenomena were understood, and gods were unnecessary. That, I think, is your original Black Time—when soulless devices labor, and lovely mysticism is gone. Yet dry and unpleasant as that might be, it is less terrible than this alternative." He gestured in a direction Pierrette thought was toward the upper town and the nemeton.

He peered at her beneath bushy eyebrows. "Are you willing to surrender to your vision of that world of soulless machines"—he used the word for a device Greeks used in their theaters, to simulate the appearance of a god on the stage—"rather than submit to this new Black Time where the machines embody the captured souls of children?"

Pierrette was not, but if it really came down to a choice . . . "I can't consider that now. One doom at a time is more than enough. I must convince your dryadeae to abandon their mad designs—or subvert them. Will you help?"

"Tell me what you want me to do."

"Find me a place to stay," she asked Kraton, "here, in the low town. I need to find out . . . how my skills . . . can be applied here, in this era."

"I know just the place. Vlasso the Boeotian won't be back until this . . . confusion ends. There's no trade with Entremont now—and too much risk for Greeks to remain."

When Kraton led her to her new domicile, the morning light was sweet and pleasant, the streets were busy, the air filled with delicious aromas of breakfasts cooking, as if there were no siege at all. Her new home was a two-room house, clean and spacious, with whitewashed plaster walls. Its door—and a single wide, wooden-grilled window—opened onto the narrow street. A rear room faced a tiny courtyard, whose far wall was of heavier stones. "Is that the town wall?" Pierrette asked, wondering how it could be defended, except by soldiers entering through her house.

Kraton pointed at the triangular wooden ladder a fathom wide at the base, a hand's span at the top. "See for yourself." Tucking her skirts up in her cincture, Pierrette climbed until she could see over the wall. Her gasp of surprise was Kraton's reward.

"I can see everything from here! There is the Roman camp." Now, for the first time, she could really get an impression of it—and of the kind of men who occupied it. From this height and distance, the moat, the earthworks, and the palisade atop it were a thin line. The two wooden towers were as if made of twigs. The fane, in the corner nearest her, was a sand-speck yearning to be a pebble.

The camp was almost perfectly square, judging by the scale of objects Pierrette had seen at close hand. It had to be . . . almost a half mile on a side! Only a central area, a stretch just over a third of the overall width, was occupied by tents—specks so tiny they blurred into hair-fine lines, regular, even, geometrically precise lines, separated by straight streets and avenues. Such precision! It was no accident, no whim of the consul who had ordered it; Pierrette knew that everything was precisely measured, the streets exactly fifty or one hundred feet wide, the encampments of each maniple of troops exactly one hundred feet square, and that such camps were built as often as every single night, when the legions were on the march.

From the number of those squares—sixty, plus twenty half-squares—she knew that two full legions—eighty-four hundred men—were camped there. And she knew that open areas two hundred feet wide normally separated the tents from the outer fortifications. But the separations were far too wide. The vacant quarter where the fane stood should have been crowded with the tents of auxiliary troops—Gallic allies from the Padus Valley, Iberian Celts, and Massilians—and the rest of the blocks with Numidian or Iberian horsemen.

Now she understood why Calvinus had not immediately assaulted Entremont. The two bare legions were only half the normal force. Without his full strength, the Roman consul had only enough men to defend his own wooden walls, built overlarge for the additional troops that had not—yet—arrived.

Farther east, the rising sun made a great gray shadow of the white Mountain of Victory—but it was not called that, not yet. Marius's battle against the Teutons would not be fought there for decades—if at all. Between camp and mountain, on the farthest horizon, she caught a glimpse of water—the sea. Citharista. Was it even a village, now?

She climbed higher, then looked down. It was not a dizzying height like Anselm's keep, but the rough scree would make for a difficult assault. She need not fear Romans flinging themselves over the wall in the night.

Vlasso the Boeotian had simple tastes—his bed and his servant's were identical low bronze-footed platforms with canvas ticks, well-filled with sweet hay scented with thyme. There were bronze and clay cooking pots on a shelf, and a simple hearth on the flat roof, accessible via a hewn-log stair opposite the town wall.

Kraton set her small bundle and a wooden box of materials she had requested, and a basket with cheese, bread, and apples, in the front room. When he had departed, Pierrette turned to Guihen. "Is there a place people gather to talk?" she asked. "I've heard what Kraton has to say, but . . ."

"The marketplace!" He reached for the basket of food, and emptied it. "Here. We'll go shopping."

"All the shops I saw were shuttered," she said.

"You've only seen part of the traders quarter. Most of the Greeks and other foreigners left the city when the siege began—or were slain by Teutomalos's thugs, during the revolt, but just down this very street is an ale brewers nook where you'll hear plenty of talk."

Entremont, Pierrette guessed, was smaller in extent than either Citharista in her day or Heraclea, but while the former was spotted with ruins and crumbling, vacant edifices, and the latter's homes were one- and two-story, here almost every tight block was two, even three stories high, especially those whose roofs she could see beyond the old bastions that enclosed the high town. There must be thousands of people.

"Since Teutomalos declared the high town off-limits to anyone who doesn't live there, or have business there," said Guihen, "merchants who don't want their trade cut in half have relocated below the wall." The alemaker's establishment was one such place. At a spot where the street widened slightly, the brewer had set two great wooden-staved barrels on trestles, and had arranged benches alongside. "He has to move those barrels whenever someone with a wagon wants to come through," Guihen remarked, "but with this siege, that's not too often now. Here—sit. I'll fetch us something to drink."

Indeed, as he had promised, there were plenty of customers. Women sat freely conversing with men. Their clothing was enough like Pierrette's that she didn't stand out, and some had Ligurian features and dark hair, so hers went unnoticed. The men's attire was mostly simple workingman's garb—plain kilts and tunics, earth-dyed. Only one elderly man wore a brightly dyed sagus, to ward off a chill no younger folk perceived. Waiting, Pierrette let their conversations flow around her. . . .

" . . . saw some Romans once," a bulky fellow with dusty bare feet was saying. "They were squat as toads. They even looked like them—no mustaches, just bare skin under their ugly noses."

"They shave everything," another man piped in. "It's lice—they never bathe, you know. They don't use soap. They just roll in the mud, then scrape it off with their funny little swords."

"Those cowards' blades?" exclaimed another, who but for the white streaks in his reddish hair, and his workman's kilt, might have been a warrior. "When they line up shoulder to shoulder, like Greeks, there's no way to swing a real sword at them."

"They don't fight like men," said the first speaker, "because they are gelded at birth. That makes them docile enough to stand in lines. But even oxen are dangerous, and if they bring up those elephants . . . they're big as houses, and they build wooden forts on their backs, and fill them with archers."

"My great-grandfather saw elephants once," said the old soldier. "Hannibal had a hundred of them—they're trained to play big war horns when they go into battle."

"Those are their teeth, you old fool!"

"Grandpa said they are horns," the other insisted. "They're louder than any you ever heard."

"Didn't you hear Teutomalos's speech last week? They're not beasts at all. They're demons that breed in the sewers of Roma."

"Dung demons or not," said a hard-faced man who wore a mail vest and a sword, "we need not fear them overmuch."

Just then, Guihen returned with tall beechwood flagons, creamy tan foam spilling over their lips, and Pierrette missed what was said next.

"What is that?" she exclaimed uneasily.

"This? Oh—this is cervisia—new ale, still working in the cask. Push your lips through the foam, like this . . ."

Pierrette did not have such mobile lips, but she tried, burying her nose in the lush stuff. "It's like sea foam!" she cried. "But not salty."

"Hush! People will think you've never sipped ale before."

"Oh, sorry. I haven't, you know." She resolved to be more cautious. How could she have known about new ale? Not one of the writers of her age wrote about that. Her next words were quiet ones: "Do they really believe that Roman soldiers are castrated and that elephants are demons, hatched from dung in the sewers?"

"What stupid things do you think the Romans say about us?" he rejoined. "Besides, if people didn't believe them monsters they might start listening to Kraton and . . ."

Pierrette made an effort to sip her ale without sucking foam up her nose, and did not reply. Was that all there was to it—that it was easier to get men to fight a hideous, castrated, dung-demon enemy than other men like themselves?

Another thread of conversation caught her ear—two middle-aged women behind her on the next bench. "Teutomalos says we'll have our own demons, but I'm still afraid of what they're doing at the nemeton," one whispered.

"I know—you can feel it, at night. And when the wind is right, the stink of turpentine . . ." As close as they were, almost leaning against Pierrette, she felt the other woman shudder. "When father came back from the battle for Arelate—when we took it from the Greeks—he brought a stratigos's head. A general. It smelled like that for months, whenever the sun warmed it."

Pierrette suppressed her own shudder. She too knew the reek of hot cedar oil, and knew also what it signified. But had there been more than just distaste for the odor of the dryades' preservatives in the woman's voice? Had it been fear—perhaps not the kind or degree of horror that Pierrette felt, remembering Heraclea, but fear, nonetheless, of what her city's priests were doing there in the closed high town?

There seemed to be little fear of the Romans who were camped below their citadel—as if the presence of the foreign army was only an impediment to trade. Why was that? These Gauls were not ignorant savages, despite fierce mustaches and rough talk—and many of them had surely fought Flaccus on the Argentia. Those men had to know how deadly was Roman discipline, how effective their gladii, those "cowards' blades," could be. Pierrette remembered that the Roman camp had seemed almost deserted. Had it purposefully been built almost larger than Calvinus's force could defend, in the expectation of reinforcements? Was the large open area a campus martius—or a corral for elephants? And why had the hard-faced Gallic soldier been so sure they were nothing to be feared? Did he know something the others did not?

At first strange and bubbly in her mouth, by the time she drank the last of her ale, Pierrette had come to enjoy its smooth coolness, less cloying than wine. "Let's visit some shops," she said, lifting her basket, "before the sun gets too low." They did so, but Pierrette did not purchase anything. She did not know what these Gauls used for a medium of exchange. She had not seen coins, nor had she observed how people had paid for their ale. There was so much she did not know.

When they returned to her new house, she felt the need to be alone for a while, and sent Guihen away. "Just come back before it gets too dark," she admonished him.

* * *

Yes, there was much she did not know. Magic was not the same everywhere. People's beliefs shaped it. Religions, rituals, and the scribblings of scholars constrained it until, in her own time, few spells worked well or at all. Here, before the onset of Christianity or Islam, the rules were sure to be different—but in what way? She had to find out.

As a small child, defiantly mourning her mother's death by secretly experimenting with the powders and potions she had left behind, Pierrette had made light appear in a clay bowl, and when it overflowed, had captured it in a blue glass bottle. The spell she had used was Greek, ancient even now, and she had modified it, in her own time, because the old Greek elements—earth, air, fire, and water—were no longer valid. Air, fire, light, and water were fluids, but earth was not. She had changed the spell's wording as one might change a postulate in an unworkable geometric theorem—to reflect a changed reality . . . and the spell worked. How would it work here and now?

She laid bowls and materials on the bare, scrubbed table: a blue sapphire hitherto sewn in the hem of her tunic, the color of the summer sky; a faded vellum scrap with a pinch of crumbled mica; a brass bowl brimming with clear water from Vlasso's stone cistern. Sunlight from the courtyard streamed across the table. The water's surface shimmered. She sprinkled mica flakes on it, and murmured phrases in a forgotten language: " . . . mica glittering from the earth . . . sapphire light of summer sky . . . fluid water, fluid light . . . a brazen bowl to hold it." She held the sapphire in the sunbeam and repeated the words. Mica reflected the scattered blue light . . . but that was all. The rewritten spell didn't work.

What of the original? She poured the water on the courtyard's hard-packed dirt, and refilled the bowl. She dribbled pale green olive oil from a clay bottle's narrow neck into the water, and floated a pinch of lint on the shimmery oil. She ignited the makeshift wick with whispered words and a flick of her fingers. It burned first with a puff of white smoke, then darker, as the oil ignited. She murmured the light spell's most ancient version—memorized from an Egyptian papyrus, copied from a Hittite inscription that recorded an even older spell, created when the world was new. " . . . Oil by olive tree begotten . . . topaz, sun-shield's light . . . precious water, Earth's kind gift . . . brazen shield that crosses over . . ."

As she spoke, she held a yellow topaz in the sunbeam, and light filled the corners of the room, eliminating shadows, creating its own, all of which pointed away from the warm, yellow glow from the bowl—the sunlight of the high Anatolian plateau where the spell had once been spoken.

Success—of a sort. But what exact premise of the oldest spell was slightly different? She scribbled with a charred vine on the tabletop.

—Mica, light out of earth.

—Sapphire, of earth, captures the sky's light.

—The equation of two fluids' natures.

—Bronze bowl—irrelevant?

Then:

—Oil lamp's light, created from sunlight falling on earth, then released from it.

—Water, vital to the olive tree, sprung from earth.

—Brass or bronze: magic metal, first metal, the sun-god's glowing shield.

There was the difference. Not light as a fluid, a substance as tangible as mica, but light as process, the flow from sky-shield sun, through the soil like water, with water into the olive tree's roots, to emerge again as . . . oil, which with lint from earth-grown flax fibers recapitulated the warm sun of the spell's land of origin.

Could she refine her understanding of the change—light as a shifting, dynamic, all-beneficent stuff, only incidentally a fluid . . . There were many spells, many hours left in the long day, and scores of tiny packets, sacks, and clay vials supplied by Kraton and his helpful wife and daughters, or brought by Pierrette from Belisama's cave.

* * *

Guihen the Ligure peered into the window. The warm glow of sunset splashed into the front room beyond. Then he looked more carefully—the sun's vermilion light was in the west, but this light . . . it crawled like viscous oil across the floor, pooling in low spots, seeming to soak in where the packed soil was less hard. . . .

Quickly, he reached in and drew the heavy curtain, then slipped inside through the door. Could the eerie light still be seen from outside? Would anyone notice? Hardly anyone had been about when he left Kraton's house—such was the town's fear of the darkness and what walked there. Would roving fantômes' spirits bother with this small street, near the furthest end of the low town, the "point" of the arrow?

There was Pierrette—asleep, her hand on her arms, slumped across the table amid a clutter of vials, bowls, spilled powders, and charcoal scrawls that covered the entire wooden surface. "Lady—awaken." He squeezed her shoulder. "Wake up! You must quench this light, before . . . someone . . . sees it."

Pierrette looked up, wide-eyed and startled. "What?" Outside, the courtyard was steeped in gloom, but here in the room, it was still day. She whispered strange words in a language the Ligure had never heard before—and the light faded. All that was left of it was a single twist of flaxen lint burning at the edge of a brass bowl.

Indeed the girl was a sorceress, the skinny youth marvelled. Did that mean everything else she had told him was true also? He hardly dared hope it—and as well, he feared it, because she had not come from a happy time, and the life she depicted for him, however long it might be, was no bed of sweet thyme or goose feathers.

"Have you found out what you need to know?" he asked. "Is it enough? If anyone but Kraton and his kin were to see all this, they'd surely tell the dryadeae, and . . ."

"I doubt anyone else will call, this late," she said, "but help me clean this up anyway. I must copy these notes before I dare wipe the table. Did you bring that papyrus or vellum I requested?"

He reached to his belt, and withdrew a thin cylinder. "This is all Kraton could find."

She unrolled it. There were two sheets, recently scrubbed clean with abrasive sandstone. "They'll do, if I write small, and use both sides."

* * *

The room was again as neat as Pierrette had found it. "You can't leave now," she told Guihen. "It's fully dark, and the moon won't rise for hours." How did she know that? Was she so in tune with the rhythms of earth and sky that she just knew? She was pointing at one of the beds. " . . . There," she said. "I'll take the other one." Guihen looked from one bed to the other, then at his hostess. Sleep with her . . . in this room? His mind filled with enticing, adolescent possibilities.

Almost subliminally he heard her murmur words he didn't quite catch. Then: What had he been thinking of? An image of a tiny black-haired child crossed his mind, a child whose face was tear-streaked and smeared with ashes, whose tiny trousers were torn and snagged.

He looked again at Pierrette, and though the earlier image was now gone, he could not imagine approaching her bed in the darkness. . . . The sudden, fierce protectiveness he felt toward her made him ashamed at the thought, and he felt dirty. "I'll pull my bed over here, by the door," he said abruptly. "If anyone comes, I'll . . ."

"Thank you," she said, smiling softly. She brushed his cheek with her fingers. "You have always been . . . will be? . . . my loyal protector."

* * *

Pierrette slept soundly, her breathing the merest whisper. Guihen, though he lay supine all night, did not sleep at all.

 

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