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Part One - Veni



Provence: a land of harsh contrasts and lovelinesses. Its clear sunlight is tangible, with taste and scent. The master wind that blows down great Rhodanus' valley has a soul, a personality, and a name: Mistral. It blows the miasmas and fevers of the low land away out to sea.
Wind and River are the heart and spirit of the land, and the people are its blood, ebbing and flowing to the beat of Celtic drums, swords against Roman shields, and hoofbeats of Franks and Moors. The pulse of the land is never still. Tribes long forgotten blend their blood with such fresh infusions, each in turn diluted, but never lost.
This is a story of the land, of a woman descended on her mother's side from folk who neither plowed nor sowed, but took what the Goddess gave, and drank from her breasts, the sacred pools of the land. They called Goddess and land alike Ma. Though inscribed in no Pantheon, her name is remembered in mater, mother, in mare, which is sea, in mammae, women's breasts, and above all, in Man, born of Ma.
This is not a Christian tale, though there are Christians in it. It is not about God who created us, but the scapegoat we created to blame for what God allows us to do, that we should not. Such a demon can be created in the minds of men, but once loosed it cannot be driven back.
Now Darkness looms at the end of time. All that is good will be locked in an ebon box. Evil will lie like gray ash across the land, like leaden clouds across a sunless sky. Yet the Black Time will not come as long as there is magic in the world, nor until the last rules have been written down.

Otho, Bishop of Nemausus

The Sorceress's Tale 

 

 

Chapter 1 - The Goddess of the Pool

Centuries later, long after the fall of Rome

* * *

Shadows and sunbeams mingled, a quilt of colors stirred by a breeze from the stony heights. Ferns nodded over moist emerald moss. Pretty red and white mushrooms were rings of tiny dancing girls wearing their feast-day best. In high branches of maple and beech, songbirds twittered and magpies laughed. In a sun-bleached land such a grove, nestled within a deep valley a hundred steps wide, was a magical place.

Stones rattled on the trail, and for a moment the songbirds were silent. The breeze abated as if to hear what had disturbed the afternoon. Was it a deer, come to drink from the pool?

She was not a deer, though she moved with deerlike grace—a girl of fifteen summers, hair black as moonless night, without Roman curls or Celtic color. She held the hem of her skirt in one hand. Entering the cool, moist shade, she wiped sweat from her brow. Her eyes, beneath dark, arching brows, were as blue as the sky at zenith. Her elfin face was modeled on the small folk who built no houses and grew no crops.

She settled by the clear pool. From the folds of her skirt she took a dried yellow-and-blue flower, rubbed it into powder, and formed it into a pill. Cupping water, she washed it down.

She plucked a red mushroom from a troupe of tiny dancers. Grimacing at its bitterness, she took another sip from the pool, then settled back amid rustling beech and maple leaves, and closed her eyes. The dappling, shifting sunlight smoothed all expression from her features, and she drowsed. . . .

* * *

Hearing the agitated rustle of dry leaves, Pierrette opened her eyes. A familiar face stared down at her—her own face, as it might be in twenty or fifty years.

"You've been avoiding me!" the older woman snapped.

"I've been busy," Pierrette protested, rubbing sleep from her eyes. "In a month, I'll have what I seek."

"Pfah! You'll remain with your nose in a book until you have answered every question." The woman spun away. The sound of her motion was the crackling of dry twigs, the rustling of leaves. "Anselm's magic is deceitful. Just because the sun never sets within his fortress's walls, time itself has not stopped. The Black Time advances from the Beginning, and falls back from the End. Will you ask what I require, or must I force it on you like medicine?"

Pierrette sighed. The goddess Ma swirled the waters of the pool. Eddies danced, and the depths grew dark. The glittering ripples were silvery stars in a moonless sky. But no, they were not stars. . . .

Cold, hard lights festooned towers of rusty iron, twinkling as greasy smoke swirled about them. Half-obscured by dark engines of unknowable function, great orange flames guttered and flickered atop a black iron sconce taller than the tallest tree.

In the foreground, as if Pierrette were standing ankle-deep in dead and stinking water, the bloated corpse of a small creature bobbed. No flies swarmed. Nothing lived there, not even maggots. The land itself was dead, without leaf or blade to cover its nakedness.

"Is that the Christians' Hell?" Pierrette shuddered.

"It's this world—not now, but soon—where River Arcus empties into the lagoon."

"No!" Pierrette gasped. She remembered a crisp breeze filling a sail, a boat's prow cutting the azure water of that lagoon. The Arcus's channels were overhung with willows and elders. "That can't be!"

" `Can't?' " snapped Ma. "It will be."

"Why are you showing me?"

"Once before, you stayed the advance," said Ma. "You must do it again."

"The demon is gone," the girl protested.

"But the Black Time still comes," replied Ma. "Will you bestir yourself?"

"What must I do?"

"I have foreseen you in a temple with druids in white robes. Beyond the city's walls were the towers you just saw."

Pierrette shifted uneasily. It sounded unpleasantly familiar. "Is the town on a hill surrounded by salt pans red as blood? Are its walls thick and smooth, in the Greek fashion?"

"You know it, then."

"It's Ugium." She had pushed her visions of Ugium into a dark room, and had closed the door. "The temple doorway is festooned with warriors' heads. I'm not ready. I wouldn't know what to do."

"You're as ready as you can be," Ma replied. "And you'll know."

"When I'm a true sorceress, I'll go."

"Don't wait for perfection," Ma grated, turning her back. "This is an imperfect world." Then she was gone, and Pierrette saw only a drift of dry leaves—yellow, russet, and brown, like the patches on the goddess's dress.

* * *

Cletus scrambled over broken limestone, his sweat evaporating in the dry air, cooling him so he could maintain his fierce pace. Eight-year-old legs pumped steadily uphill. He had to find the sorceress!

Gilles the fisherman had come into harbor under full sail. Seeing Cletus fishing, he shouted "Boy! A Saracen ship beyond the fog! Fetch my daughter Pierrette. Hurry!"

Gilles set off up the red, crumbling rocks of the Eagle's Beak, to alert the mage Anselm. It was anyone's guess who would reach his objective first—the old man on the steep, short trail, the able boy with the longer route ahead . . . or the Saracen vessel edging through the fog.

Cletus shouted to those he passed in the streets. "Warn the knight Reikhard! A Saracen is offshore!" He did not stop running. He prayed he would find Pierrette in time—and that all his friends would see him with her.

"There are the Mussulmen!" he would say. The sorceress would cast fire. Muslim sailors would scream and burn. He imagined Pierrette saying, "Cletus, my champion; wade forth and slay them." He, tall as a tree, would pick up the ship, emptying men, swords, and ill-gotten treasures.

He had to find Pierrette before Gilles reached Anselm's door, or his chance to be a hero would be stolen by the old magician.

A mile beyond the town he saw her descending the trail. "Pierrette, come!" he gasped. "Saracens!"

She looked over the coast, far below. "How far out are they?"

"Still in the fog."

"Will you help me, Cletus?"

He puffed his heaving chest out. "Whatever you wish." He envisioned himself carrying her down the valley in great strides.

"Run to my father's house. Get the big book with the red leather cover, and meet me at the wharf. Are you tired?"

"Me? I'm not even out of breath—but I'll run faster still if you make me tall."

She chuckled despite her black mood, and waved a hand. "There. I've made you agile as a goat." She gave him a push. The boy indeed ran with the gangly grace of a sure-footed goat—but the only magic was his desire to impress Pierrette, the prettiest girl in the town. Yet he would rather have been a giant than a goat.

* * *

Cletus arrived at the wharf shortly after Pierrette, clutching a heavy volume against his bony chest. "Will you find a spell to turn the Mussulmen into toads?"

"Be quiet, Cletus. I'm looking for something. Ah! Here it is." She spread the pages wide.

"A spell?"

"Not a spell. Be silent."

Shifting from foot to foot as if he had to pee, Cletus obeyed.

It was an observation from ibn Saul's treatise on Moorish navigation. The Saracen captain would depend on a knotted line and a sandglass to measure sailing distance, and upon the line's straightness in the water for confidence that he had not deviated from his course. Above all, he would depend upon his memory of the coastline.

"Give me your fishing line," she commanded Cletus.

She began tying knots in it, one every foot or so.

"You'll ruin it!"

"If the Saracens sell you as a slave, you'll have no time for fishing."

Pierrette tied a splinter to the end of the line. "I need the red box from my father's boat." Cletus scrambled for it, then Pierrette withdrew a sandglass. Working its cork free, she poured a third of the sand into the box. Replacing the cork, she turned the glass, and watched sand trickle through its constricted waist.

"Fog bemuses," she murmured, too softly for gathering townsmen to hear. None came close; she was useful to them, but sorceresses had no friends.

"Sun confuses," she said. "Log and knotted cord confound."

She tossed the cord-and-splinter "log" into the water.

"Daydreams range, and coastlines change, and trickling sand forgotten falls."

Pierrette turned to the boy. "I need you to look for the ship, and tell me what it does, Cletus. Can you climb that tall pine?"

"If you make me as tall as the tree, instead . . ."

"If I turn you into a squirrel . . ."

"I need no magic to climb trees!" he hissed, backing away. "You'll see how well I climb."

She chuckled softly—but none of the stone-faced gentes found humor in her words or Cletus's consternation. Sorceresses were not ever funny.

"I see it!" Cletus shouted, from high within the pine's gracefully spreading parasol.

* * *

The captain of the rakish vessel tugged at his beard. He eyed the ribbon pennant atop the single mast. "You're sure you've maintained course?"

The sailor swore upon his hope of Paradise, the beard of Muhammad, and a list of saintly ancestors. He had paid out the cord and counted the passage of knots with every turn of the twenty-eight-minute glass. The line had streamed straight astern.

The captain read the sun's height from the butt of his fist resting on the horizon, to the endmost knuckle of his thumb. They should be east of Massalia—but where were the red rock scarps of the Eagle's Beak? The Saracen knew the coasts from Jebel Tarik to Massalia to Constantinople, from Smyrna to Alexandria to Ceuta. Had buffeting winds addled his brain, or the sun cooked it? For the first time since his beard had sprouted . . . he was lost.

"Wear about and follow the coast eastward," he said softly. "Call me when you sight familiar land.

"It's over," he told himself as he descended to his cabin. Never again would men sail with him; they would know his failure.

Wearing—changing tacks by turning downwind and hauling the huge sail around before the mast to the new lee side—was not left to subordinates. Though the mate was pleased to do it himself, it did not take long to register that the change was more than a promotion.

The captain remained below for seven turns of his large sandglass, until he heard the lookout's cry. He recognized the islands ringing Olmia bay, just where they should be if he were indeed exactly seven turns east of the Eagle's Beak. "I am going mad," he muttered to himself, a broken man.

* * *

In Citharista, celebration began as soon as the ship was hull down

"Tell me," the priest Otho asked the elderly magus. "What turned the Saracen away?"

"I have no idea," Anselm replied, his white beard stained with red wine from a jug making the rounds. "I cast no spell. Ask my apprentice."

Otho turned to the dark-haired girl. Such a slim shape could have belonged to a boy, but he was not deceived. How old was she? Fifteen? As old as he, when he had taken his vows. She was as lovely as her mother Elen had been—the same hair, blacker than black, and the same eyes, blue as the waters of the calanques, where the white sand beneath them shined in sunlight. Ah, to be fifteen again, he mused, suffused with sweet regret.

"What did the Saracen see when he turned eastward?" he asked her.

"I don't know, P'er Otho," Pierrette said. "I only uttered the tiniest of glamours, making him uncertain what his eyes showed him."

"Ah," Otho sighed. "Good."

"Good?" The corners of her shapely mouth dimpled. "Does a small spell condemn me less than had I called up a great storm with black clouds, and . . ." Even as she spoke, tiny glitters at her fingertips danced and crackled like miniature lightning.

"Stop that!" Otho snapped nervously.

Pierrette giggled, and the display faded. "I'm sorry, Father," she said with false penitence. "It slips my mind how even innocuous magic reminds you of Hell's fires, and tormented souls, and . . ."

"Stop that," he repeated. "I am not the one who should be frightened by your magic."

"You're right," she said, now truly penitent, thinking of her confrontation at the sacred pool. "The one who should be most afraid . . . is me."

* * *

"Why didn't you kill them all?" demanded Cletus. "They'll come back."

"I'll send them away again," said Pierrette. "I don't like fighting."

"That," Cletus said, "is why you weren't much fun, when you were a boy."

"I was not a boy! My father had me pretend I was, because he had no male heir. The castellan would have forced him to sell his olive grove to some man with strong sons. Everyone knew I was a girl—they just kept quiet so the castellan would remain fooled."

"People say you used magic to fool them."

"Little girls don't know magic. Anyway, there isn't much difference between little boys and girls."

"There is too! Little girls don't have . . ."

"I mean if I put you in a dress, with a ribbon in your hair . . ."

"No! The other boys would laugh, and I would be . . . I would be . . ."

"Humiliated? Of course you would. It isn't pleasant to have to pretend you're something you are not. You wouldn't make a satisfactory girl—you're far too bloodthirsty."

"Good!" Cletus grunted. He turned his head, hearing iron-shod hooves. "Diodoré!" he exclaimed.

Pierrette watched the knight approach. Diodoré was the youngest of Reikhard's soldiers, and the best looking. Her heart beat faster. Diodoré carried his casque under a mail-clad arm. His coiffed hair was a red-gold crown in the last sunlight of evening.

"You're my nemesis," he said. "The Moors were my chance to dent my shield in real combat—and you chased them away."

"Did you ride all this way to chastise me?" Pierrette feigned indignation. "Are there no brigands to slay?"

"Come. Ride with me." He stretched out a hand. "It's almost dark, and evil stalks."

Pierrette envisioned her cheek against Diodoré's broad back and her arms around his waist. She shook her head.

"Take me!" Cletus exclaimed.

"You'd wet your pants," said the knight.

"I'm not a baby!"

"I think that's a good idea!" Pierrette said, eying the gathering dusk. "Cletus lives outside the town wall, and should not go home alone."

The young knight put the best face on it. "He need fear nothing," he said, "neither beasts nor malign spirits. . . . But I'll see you safely home first."

He pulled the boy up behind himself. As they threaded the crumbling, narrow streets, Cletus's constant chatter—"What is this strap for?" and "Why is your sword on this side, not that?"—kept the young man from saying courtly things, and saved Pierrette having to think up responses that would neither encourage nor insult. She wanted Diodoré to say such things, but if he did . . . she would discourage him.

Life was unfair. She had to spurn him. The goddess had made that clear: Pierrette's mother Elen had died because she had kept one foot in each world. Sorceress or housewife, but not both. Her virginity gone, Elen could not command the great magics—and that had destroyed her.

Now the goddess had put yet another burden upon Pierrette—to abandon her studies before she was ready. To fare out on a fool's errand . . . to Ugium.

At the stone staircase to her father's house, she bid horseman and boy good-bye. Gilles's snores greeted her, so she tiptoed to her pallet. Even tired as she was, sleep was long in coming. She promised herself that she would go fishing with her father in the morning. She would doze in the clear Mediterranean sun, and would not think a single unpleasant thought.

 

 

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