The seeress known as Petra Veleda was bored. Ortagion did not come back that day or the next. She began to worry. The view from her tower window was charmingthe distant glitter of the azure Middle Sea, the nearer lagoons red with algae that thrived in concentrated salt, the rich fields where farmers laboredbut that panorama soon became ordinary. What was happening in the gods' sanctum? What were the dryades deciding?
Ortagion had had his doubts about Teutomalos's plan, and she had surely intensified them with her visions, but would he prevail against oily Sabinos, pragmatic Ambioros, or the sinister Cunotar? Would the vision of a great Gaulish state override their disgust at the abomination of the headless innocents who served it? Now that she understood the nature of the threat, was she helpless to do anything about it?
Her saddle pack lay unopened on a low bench. She shook out her boy's clothing. Would her disguise work here, where she had already been seen by everyone as a woman? She shrugged. If she were caught, she would think of some explanation.
She bound her breasts tightly and slipped into her tunic. Her hair was again a problem: tradesmen and boys wore theirs less than shoulder length, and warriors either stiffened theirs into spikes or braided it in a tight coif to fit beneath a helmet. Being small, she could not make herself a credible warrior.
She did not want to cut her hair. She had wasted her youth as a boy, and her decision to let her locks grow had been the first step in revealing her true nature in Citharista. Now, at last, it was long enough to reach from behindhalfway down her back. She tied it with a cord, and tucked it inside her tunic. That would at least conceal its length.
Enakles's camp was beneath the unfinished wall, a hundred paces south of her. She would have to wait until dusk to slip down the stairs, before moonrisebut dusk was a long time in coming. Time was subjective, when awaiting an event. With nothing to fill the hours, they stretched interminably; yet when there was much to do, hours flicked by too quickly to grasp, and not everything got done. Was time truly inconstant, or did it only seem so?
At last the stars appeared; the glow in the west faded. She slipped out the tower door. Barefoot, she edged around the corner, not looking directly at the sentry on the wall, lest he sense her eyes on him. The stairs led down behind the tower, so as soon as she was out of his sight, she would enter that of the sentry south of the tower.
Pierrette had stalked deer with the hunter Aam; she knew how to observe from the corner of her eye, using peripheral vision to sense the slightest motion. The sentries, facing half away from her, looking outward, would not see her directly, but were ideally placed to sense her movement. How quickly the skill came back: sliding her toe forward, seeking any brittle twig or loose stone chip that would betray her if she stepped on it. Then a smooth, slow forward surge, hardly recognizable as human motion. She envisioned a sea-slug pushing its inner mass of organs forward inside its skin, then pulling the empty sack after.
It was as if she were in the high forest above Sormiou with her golden-haired not-quite-lover Aam. Aam had lived out his uncomplicated life millennia ago, and had perhaps died an old man long before history was conceived, before good or evil had been defined. He had taught her not magic or spells, but the slow, calculated, intermittent movements of the hunt, the concentration on being one with leaves and branches, with one's prey. It had a magic of its own. She had notyetbeen seen.
Once having descended the first flight, Pierrette was level with the sentry atop the wall, totally exposed. She slid another step forward and felt the lip of a tread with her bare toes. Again, her body undulated ahead, a slow wave on a sea of honey. Down one step, then two, and she was below the sentry's natural line of sight; he would have to look down to see her. Another, and her head was level with the top of the wall. She bent her knees, then backed down the remaining treads on all fours, into deep shadow.
Enakles and his men lived in tents aligned like a military camp, now steeped in darkness, but therea lamp's glow was diffused by a fabric hanging. Enakles was working late. She crept close enough to hear a quill scratching on papyrus.
"Psst!"
"Seeress!" Enakles looked up. "Or should I call you `boy'?"
" `Boy' is fine, for now. I need your help."
"Pull that curtain shut, then pour yourself teait's a stimulating herb, just the thing for late-night plotting. Good. Now tell me what brings you here."
"I found out from Ortagion what I need to know. He believes the danger I have envisioned is real, but I'm afraid the others won't heed himespecially Cunotaror allow him to do the wise thing."
"I don't know what you're talking about."
She sighed. "What were you told, then, in the cave where we met?"
"Only that I should help you, if you asked. You'll have to tell me what I need to know."
It was going to be a long night. She sipped tea, then began to tell him what she had foreseen, and what the dryadeae were doing to bring about the worst of her visions.
"I think you guessed right," Enakles said at last. "Cunotar is your worst problem. You won't convince him. Ambioros will take the bird in hand, without regrets for a future he will never see. Sabinos will side with whoever seem most sure of themselves."
"I have to try to sway them."
"You may trybut you need a plan to deal with the possibility of failure. Unfortunately, your vision of a united Gaul is appealing to us Greeks. We've done well under Celtic rule, oftener than not. The local Greek factotum won't help."
"Celtic rule? Who?"
"Maybe Alexander wasn't exactly a Celt, but Makedonians aren't really Greek, either."
"If not the factor, then who?"
"I met you in Lugh's cave. To my men, Lugh and Herakles, who built Tiryns's walls, are one and the same. They will help, if they canand we shall have to see what the god has to say. Come."
"Now?"
"Are gods bound by day and night? If we hurry, we can still get you back into your tower unseen."
The HerakleonHerakles's templewas built in the Greek manner: two stone chambers entered from beneath a colonnade of fat Doric posts. The triangular gable above was a bas-relief of one of the god-hero's labors: he rode amid a herd of cattle painted red-brown; their horns were long, and curved up like the arms of a lyre.
Pierrette hesitated at the outer door. "How shall I address him? Is he really a god, or a hero?" Such things changed with time and the climate of people's belief; the hero of one age was a god in the next, and old, neglected gods assumed lesser roles: unseen, brooding spirits lurking in dark, stony places, beneath bridges, and in hollow trees.
"He was a god long ago, before he became a hero. Now . . . this is his temple, isn't it? Therefore he must be a god again."
The cool, scented air that blew from the open doorway was neither musty nor damp, nor laden with incense, cedar wood, or oil. It smelled like the clean breeze across the Crau, the Plain of Stones that bordered the vast delta of the Rhodanusthe plain where Herakles was said to have called down stones from heaven, burying his enemies. The plain was still stone-strewn, vast, and barren. It lay just west and north of Heraclea.
"I must enter alone," she said.
"I'll wait here." Enakles stepped behind a pillar.
There was light, faint and diffuse, as if the temple had no roof, and the stars shone in. Ahead was the door to the inner chamber, the god's sanctum. She pushed. It opened silently on oiled bronze hinges. By misty light she discerned the god's image: bronze hair leafed with gold, eyes of nacre and green malachite, enameled skin the color of pale coral. His lean, muscular body was robed in red silk that waved gently in the draft from the opening door.
She froze, startled by the motionas if sculpted bronze could come alive. The robe was actual cloth. It moved . . . but statues' eyes did not. Statues' muscles did not flex, as if stretching after a nap. And Herakles, a Hellene, should not look . . . exactly . . . like Aam, her Golden Man. . . .
"Pebble," he said, smiling, his face crinkling as no bronze or gold could. Pebble: that had been Aam's name for her. He had splashed her with water to see if . . . "If you shine even more brightly when you are wet," he said.
"Aam?" She was dreamingor she was entirely mad.
"Where did you go?" he asked, stepping down from his low, marble pedestal. "I looked for you outside the cave, but you were not there." The cave . . . chambers whose walls were covered with stencilled human hands, painted with deer, seals, and animals Pierrette had never seen, like elephants, and brutal-looking, flat-footed unicorns. The cave's entrances were closed in Pierrette's time, the upper beneath masses of fallen rock, and the lower far beneath the risen sea.
"I went home. To my own world and time." She would have said more, but his arms were around her, his mouth on hers.
"No!" she gasped, turning aside. "I must not."
"This is not my world," Aam said in a hurt tone. "You will not be trapped here. And you want to love me."
"It isn't my world either! My world is . . . far away. I must remain . . ." She could not say it. There had not been a word for "virgin" in the age of stone. She had wanted him, once. In a way, she still did, but she wanted more. She turned away so he would not see her tears, and mistake them for lack of resolve.
"I need help," she said. "I sought the god of this shrine, and I don't understand why you are here."
"Tell me what you need," said Aam.
She did not know how much sense a man of the deep past, before gods had been conceived, would make of her tale, but she told it . . . again.
"You will have to make your own fate here," he said, pensively. "I can do nothing for you." Her shoulders slumped. Hadn't she feared that all along? But he was not finished. "Remember this: when all else is lost, seek safety on the Plain of Stones."
"The Crau?"
"The Plain of Stones, where I first met you, long ago."
"But I have never been on the Plain of . . ." She turned toward him. His voice had changed. Aam was gone, and in his place stood another, whose black hair was oiled and curled in thick, shiny ringlets. "Minho!" she gasped.
"Why are you wearing such unbecoming clothes?" the sorcerer-king asked. "You looked prettier in clouds and moonbeams."
"Why are you playing tricks on me? You're not Minho of the Isles! You're Herakles, aren't you?"
"You know who I am. What do names matter?" He shook his head sadly. "I can't save you, if you choose to stay here. Come away with me. Come to my kingdom, and let this ugly world fade away. What can it offer you?"
What, indeed? Not hope. Only the ever-encroaching end of everything, and the rule of the Eater of Gods. But she could not give up. There was still a chancea slim chance, and she had just thought of it. She glanced toward the door, where Enakles waited. "I must try to save it," she said. "I can't give up."
No one answered her. There was no one thereonly a bronze statue with gilded hair and seashell eyes.
"Take me back," she asked Enakles. On the way, she told him what she planned to do. He did not protest. He and his fifty workmen would be leaving soon anyway, when the last courses on the east wall were finished.