"I'm hungry," Alkides said, beside her. She giggled. "Yes, that too, but I mean, for food."
"We don't have any."
"We have a goat, and it's time to sacrifice her." He pointed skyward. "It's two hours to dawn. Enough time to burn a goat for Zeus, and to have a morsel or two ourselves."
Pierrette's limbs trembled. Was it reaction to all the amazing sensations her body had given her, through that long night, or had the earth itself trembled when he uttered the name of the king of his gods?
She watched as he livened their fire's embers with dry twigs, and as he laid broken branches atop them. He loosened the goat's tether, and lifted the doomed animal by its hind legs. It bleated protests. A long-bladed bronze knife gleamed. "Zeus aid me!" he bellowed, further terrifying the suspended goat. "Show those unbelieving Ligures your anger, and those Gauls too." He sounded as if he really didn't believe Pierrette's story about the Gauls, but had appended that phrase just in case.
"Send them a sign of your might, so they'll let me and my cattle pass by." Pierrette glanced uneasily around, as if an angry god might actually appear. Alkides's words rang with conviction, as might hers, speaking not with a terrifying male deity, but with Ma, whom she knew so well.
"Help me, Zeus, and I'll sacrifice the first calf sired by the black bulls to you." He slashed the knife across the goat's throat. Blood gouted. The animal thrashed, and then hung still.
"Soon, we'll eat!" he said, grinning at Pierrette. He dressed out the goat with quick, expert passes of his knife, then butchered it, separating a long, flaccid tenderloin from among the bloody muscles. "For us," he said, "and the rest for the god."
He added substantial branches to the fire and, when they ignited, he laid the goat atop them. He stretched the tenderloins in a spiral around green sticks, which he pushed into the ground close to the fire. The goat crackled and spat as tongues of flame enveloped it, and the air filled with a delicious aroma.
Pierrette had never sacrificed to a god. She was not sure such things were not just superstition. She argued with Ma, or begged, but Alkides's Zeus was no elderly earth spirit, and Zeus had not been there, face-to-face with him.
"You don't think it will work, do you?" Alkides took her hand in his bloody one. "Here. Feel." He pressed her palm against the ground. Again she felt the tremor, the faint quivering, like a dove held in her hand.
"What is that?"
"Zeus, answering me."
"But I felt the vibration before you killed the goat," she said hesitantly, not wanting to deflate his confidence, but not wanting to be taken for a fool, either.
He grinned toothily. "I think Zeus planned to help me even before I asked him. Sometimes, just knowing what a god is going to do anyway is better than asking him for something."
He turned the meat-stick. One side already gleamed crisply with drippings. Then he turned to her. She smiled at how a man's body gave away his thoughts. She reached out for him, and took possession of her newfound toy. . . .
"Are you still a virgin?" he asked, some time later.
"I don't feel like one," she replied, stretching languorously, limbs all soft and warm, the aches and tensions gone. She could hardly bring herself to worry that dawn's light was creeping up the eastern sky, and that the men just across the river were surely awake and preparing to ford it.
She basked in the fire's warmth, and in Alkides's admiring gazeno less intense for all the ways he had taught her to sate him. And she was no less a virgin, for all the pleasures he had given herfor all the ways they had thwarted the intent of ancient magic's rule, without violating the letter of it. She returned his gaze, enjoying the play of muscles, the interaction of their ripples with old scarsand wondering how he had gotten those.
"I suppose we should get dressed," he said. "If Zeus is being a good fellow today, we'll want to watchand if not, we should be ready to run." He didn't seem to care any more than she did. How could two bodies so pacify the racing, fearful minds within? She felt . . . invulnerable.
The very act of putting on her clothing and tying back her hair, of becoming a "boy" again, made her feel less so. Always before, being a boy made her feel less threatened, stronger, but now she did not. Naked she had felt . . . like Ma herself.
"We have to drive the cattle away," Alkides said. "If Zeus decides to act on my plea, I don't want them to stampede or scatter." They harried the herd northward, away from the river, waving leafy branches at them and occasionally striking the laggards.
Returning to the camp, they rolled up the tent and ate the last crackly morsels of meat. Alkides put his hand to the ground. "Come on. Let's see what they're up to."
The river looked higher than the night before, and seemed to fill more of its gravelly bed. "The spring snow-melt has begun in the mountains," Alkides said. That surprised Pierrette, because it had not been springtime when she left Citharista to begin her unlucky journey. It was only another example of the unpredictability or imprecision of the spell. If she had taken time to pursue her studies in the direction she had been going, she might have had a solution to that problem.
The Gauls were testing the water to find the best crossing. "I hope it's too deep," Pierrette said.
"Not me!" Alkides responded. "They could still keep me from reaching the Alps. In fact, I've a mind to encourage them to cross. Come on!" He led herpulled herto the edge of the bank, where they were in plain sight. Cunotar spotted them first, and raised a cry, urging his men onward into the untested waters. Pierrette trembled so hard the ground seem to shake beneath her feet. The blood roared in her ears, like surf in a storm.
"They're crossing!" she hissed, trying to pull away, to fleebut Alkides's grip on her wrist was like an iron shackle. Why didn't he let her go? The leading Gaul was almost across, and the rest were following close behind. Cunotar was waving his sword.
The first Gaul goaded his horse up the slope the cattle had trodden, but he slid back, and a sizable clump of soil went with him. Pierrette clung to Alkides's arm, shaking like a leaf in a breeze. Two more horsemen were across, riding along the bank, seeking a way up.
"Now!" Alkides exclaimedbut she could hardly hear him, for the roaring in her ears. She could hardly hear the cries of the Gauls, either. The noise was not in her ears alone. The ground was shaking like a beaten drumhead. One Gaul drove his horse up the bank, which collapsed under the struggling hooves. Man, horse, dirt, and cobbles tumbled back. Cunotar's cries were inarticulate rage, swept away by the tumult. Several Gauls turned their panicked horses downstream, and spurred them to a gallop.
And then she saw ita towering, brown wall: tumbling water, uprooted trees, even great rocks taller than a man on horseback, higher than a house, filling the valley from one bank to the other. Her feet danced unwillingly on the shaking ground.
The rushing water came faster than horse could run, or bird fly. It reached the first Gauls, curling like the crest of a great wave, and . . . they were gone. Cunotar alone stood firm, his angry cries drowned by the roar that battered Pierrette's ears. A great, branched tree thrust from the mass water-wall just as it swept Cunotar's horse's feet out from under it, and she saw the dryade raised high above the torrent, skewered on sharp, broken wood. Man, tree, and roiling water sped ahead, overwhelming the remaining horses. Behind the rushing front, the valley brimmed full and brown, a moving lake that tore at the bank where Pierrette and Alkides stood.
"We have to get farther back!" She hardly heard Alkides, but she understood. They scrambled away from the edge, and uphill. The roaring lessened, but the ground still shook. A huge chunk of the bank where they had stood ripped loose, tumbled, and broke up in the churning water. They climbed farther before turning to look again. Far out on the marshy plain, almost at the edge of vision, the flood spread in a fan, white where it boiled over and around the stones its initial rush had thrown down. Beneath their hill, the river subsided slightly, and enormous rapids foamed over boulders that now filled the channel. The rush of water was still loud, but no longer overwhelming.
"Zeus heard me!" Alkides yelled in her ear.
Pierrette made a face at him. Zeusor only a terrible springtime flood? Alkides grinned, and led her away. She glanced back anxiouslycould anyone have survived? She did not think so.
They found the cattle a half mile further on, still together. "Let's camp there," Alkides said, pointing at a sheltered hollow. Though the day was bright and sunny, the wind had become chill. "It'll be a few days before the upland streams are crossable."
Did he assume she was going with him? While they made camp and gathered firewood, and cut soft boughs for a bed, she considered that. Where was she going, anyway? What could she do, when she got there? She had fulfilled the goddess's vision: she had sat in converse with dryades in Hreaclea, and had freed the captive souls in their nemeton. There were ninety-nine fewer fantômes than there had been.
But it was not Teutomalos alone who had spoken with the dryades of Heraclea. And he had not spoken with the dryades of Heraclea only. She had mapped a hundred oppida, Gaulish cities. There might be as many as ten thousand fantômes in all. There were surely towns and temples not recorded in Anselm's scrolls.
So what good had she done? What possible difference had she made? She could not burn every nemeton from the Atlantic to the Alpsand as far beyond them as the river Danu flowed, to the Euxine Sea, the extent of the Gaulish lands. Her success was a single raindrop in an ocean, and signified nothing. It would take some great, all-encompassing spell to do more, a spell uttered at just the right moment. And she knew neither the spell nor the moment . . .
Or did she? But just as she reached for that idea, Alkides interrupted her thoughts. "You're daydreaming! Aren't you hungry? I saved us a bit of the goat." She sighed. Later, there would be time to think, to remember.
"Zeus didn't save us," she said. The sun had set, the moon risen, and Alkides had just put a fresh wrist-thick branch on the fire, which lapped hungrily at it. "The flood would have come one way or another."
"But it came. Sometimes it's wise to know what the gods intend to do, and to get out of the way of it as we didas those Ligures did not."
They found wild onions growing in a hollow, and edible tubers to make a tasty stew. They ate well, and then she was sleepy. But when they settled atop their springy boughs, Alkides had other ideas than sleep . . . and his enthusiasm was catching. Though far less skilled than he, she was an apt student, and when her hand found his manhood, she felt a wondrous sense of power that she could control this huge man with a touch of her fingers, her lips . . . as if he were the stallion, and she the rider, putting her great powerful mount through its paces. . . .
Later, it was his turn, and when he let loose her reins, she was sure she whinnied like any other mare. Oh yes, there were so many ways around the will of gods and goddessesand each time Alkides again rose to her insistence touches, she was determined to discover one more. . . .
The next day Alkides caught two rabbits, one in a snare, the other with a well-thrown rock. There was no urgency to move on. During the long hours while Alkides foraged or tended his cattle, she had time to think, to decide what she would doand to think on other things as well. "When we loved on the Plain of Stones," Minho had said to her. She had been confused at the time. It had been only a dream, because she was young, and had loved no one. She thought she understood that nowtime was not immutable, and the sorcerer-king had not been speaking of her past, but of his.
The only thing wrong with that idea was that the man she had loved here had not been Minho, but Alkides. She quivered, remembering a particular intimate detail she had discovered just last night . . . but she knew no such things about Minho. Would he have responded in just the same way to her probing touches, to her sly, curious experimentation? And would he have known her in like manner? Minho was dark, not red. She had never seen him naked. She could only imagine.
She turned her mind to the other discrepancythe "Plain of Stones" itself. In her own time, the Crau was indeed stonyand now she knew why. No single act of a god had flung the stones there. Hundreds of springtime floods had done that, creating a broad delta. She had gone back to the river during the day, and had seen how the floodwaters had spread mud and stone in a great fanand how, even now, the lessening flow wound among the stones, carrying the mud away. Indeed, by summer's end, the result would be a small "plain of stones," that would grow in future years.
Clever Alkides. He had crossed the mountains before, and had seen the melting fields of snow, the ice dams in the high valleys, and had known that there would be a flood. He had led his Ligure pursuers a merry chase, keeping them in the valley, in the flood's path, always with an eye to the nearest high ground for himself and his cattle. And he was probably not the only one to have used that trickor who would use it. This time there were no survivors or companions to record the tale, but in some future time there would be. Someone would catch his enemy in a flood, out on a much-grown plain of stones, and the legend of Zeus and Herakles would be born, to be told for thousands of years. She herself had heard the tale from Caius the boatman, a year agoor a thousand years in the future.
The tent skins were rolled, the cattle already spread out on the trail east toward the far Alps. "Are you sure you won't come with me?" Alkides pleaded one last time.
Pierrette fingered the coin she had found tied in the seam of her tunicthe coin Doreta had given her in the cave. She was surprised to find it was shiny and new, on one side a face, on the other the image of a woman on horseback. Was it Epona, goddess of horses? "A goddess gave me this coin, to pay a boatman," she said, "and the river Rhodanus lies west of here."
"I saw no boatmen when I crossed it," he replied.
"There will be one when I get there." Only after saying that did she realize her unintentional pun. When she got there.
He reached out for her with both arms, but she turned her face from his kiss. The time for that was over now. She had no regrets, and wonderful memories, but those lay in a past now behind her, to which no spell would allow her to return.
A strange, puzzled expression crossed Alkides's face. "What?" she asked.
"I was going to say . . . `I'll see you again, when I am kingand you will share my throne.' But I'm not a king. I'm a cattleman."
"Perhaps you were a king, for a moment, and I your queen. And if you find a throne, I'll be happy for you," she said. Then she shook her head. "But I must goand you must catch up with your cows, before they stray." She turned, and walked away. She promised herself she would not look backbut each time that she did, until Alkides was out of sight, he did too, and he waved at her. Each time, her tears blurred the image of him. The last time she looked, she couldn't see him wave, she only felt that he had. Then she saw only the brown blot of his herd against a green hillside, and at last, nothing at all.
The landing where she remembered a boatman, years before, was where the Fossae Marianae, the Roman Canal, came close to the Rhodanus, the great river that drained Provence and lands beyond. How far away was she? Fifteen miles? Twenty? The canal would not yet be dug, nor would Arelate, the city it served, be built. The very ground it would be dug through might not yet exist, because it was silty delta soil that Rhodanus laid down in springtime and took away again at season's end as the centuries passed.
Rivers changed their beds, too. The flooding stream that bore the rocks that in her day would pave the Crau plain was the Druentiabut in her future, the Druentia did not empty into the sea at all. It wound northward and joined Rhodanus at Avennio, Avignon. Now, her crossing place might still be open ocean.
But she remembered how it would be, someday . . . "Mondradd in Mon," she whispered as she walked. "Borabd orá perdó. Far ahead was a glimmer of wateropen water that would in some later time be the Camargue, a broad tangle of channels, lagoons, and reeds. "Merdrabd or vern, arfaht ará camdó."
She trudged wearily. Had her nights of play with Alkides drained her? A frightening thought occurred: what if he had been wrong? What if her magic, unlike his capricious gods, did not depend upon the exact letter of the rule, but upon the intent of its wielder? Of her virginity, so long guarded, only a technicality remained. In spirit, she was no more virginal than any prostitute lurking in the old amphitheater in Massalia.
Would the spell still work? Or had she trapped herself in this ancient age, deluded by Alkides's clever persuasion and her own desires? She trudged on. Surely she had gone several miles by now, and the water looked no nearer. But her very fatigue was reassuring: she was still on dry land. When she stumbled over a half-exposed stone she became elated, because the river floods had not come this far in Alkides's day.
When the western sky reddened, and the sun lowered itself below the flat horizon, she made a rude shelter of tamarisk branches, and lit a small fire. When the spark leaped from her fingertip to the tinder, she was again reassured: she was not entirely without magic. She dozed, but with no food in her stomach, real sleep eluded her. When the moon at last arose, she began walking again. When the morning sun's rays made her shadow stretch out in front of her, she rested again, but not long. Now thirst drove her. The rocky ground was bone dry, desert dry. . . . Rocky? When had that happened? She had not noticed. But it was a good sign. A gray line marked the horizon. A cloud? A fog bank? Notrees! She picked up her pace, heedless of stubbed toes. Trees. Willows and poplars. It was the tall, lush growth that lined the fossa and Rhodanus's banks. Thirstily, she scrambled down the canal's bank. The old Roman stone was half buried, overgrown, as only centuries of neglect could make it. If not her own time, it was at least long past the Romans' day. The water was brackish. She rinsed her mouth and spat it out. The river itself would be fresher. It was there, just over the far bank, a hundred paces farther on.
She waded into the great stream, and knelt to splash handsful of cold water into her mouth, onto her face. She felt with her toes beneath broad-leaved water plants for their starchy tubers, and collected a dozen. She pulled several tangy wild onions. A stilt-legged bird strutted and chattered angrily. She found the nest it could not defendand several creamy, brown-flecked eggs.
Hungry as she was, she restrained herself. She lit a fire atop a flat stone. She crushed the tubers between two rocks, added the onions to the paste, and broke several small eggs over them. She made them into patties, and when her fire had burned down, she brushed the ashes away and baked them on the stone. Then she went to the river's edge again, and drank.
The sun was warm. When her belly was full, she was tempted to nap, but instead she looked upriver and down. Which way? There was only one place where river and canal were this close together. If she went upstream and the distance widened, and she found no ferryman, she would only have to retrace a half-hour walk. So: upstream.
It was not far. The landing was laid with cobbles. There were no boats, so she sat down to wait. She would have to hire passage downstream. She now had a destination. It had not come to her all at once, while she sported with Alkides, but when she had faced the conclusion that she could not destroy all the fantômes' heads in all the oppida in Gaul, she had sorted through what she knew, especially the histories, and had found what she wanted: the specific, well-defined turning point where she mightonly mightbe able to make a crucial difference. . . . But she had to get there first, and that would not be easy.
First, she had to get to Massalia. She rubbed Doreta's coin between thumb and forefinger. It was no longer shiny. It was even more worn than when she had received itas worn as it should be, hundreds of years after that. Then she was sure she was truly back in her own time.
The first boat coming downriver was heaped high with bales of hides. It kept to midstream, and did not stop when she waved. The second was a smaller, lighter craft.
"I'll take you as far as the river's mouth," the boatman agreed. "After that, you're on your own. A galley stops there every once in a while, and there's an inn where you can wait for it. My father owns it."
He bit her coin. "That's silver all right. I can't take that, not for a trip that I'm making anywayand going downstream, I don't even have to row. You can break it at the inn, and I'll take my share then." She had worried how to stretch her single coin to cover her voyage. Now the problem was solved.
She stayed at the inn for two days, until a coasting galley put in at the stone wharf. Its passengers were two priests from Saintes-Maries, the seaside shrine where Magdalen and the other Christian saints had landed in Provence long ago. The priests' destination was Saint Victor's Abbey in Massalia, where Saint Lazarus was buried, having lived out his second life as bishop of that town.
Before boarding the galley, she put on her skirt, her shawl, and a warm, serviceable blouse given her by the innkeeper's wife. She had no money left, and she had guessedrightlythat the galley's captain would be more likely to trust a woman than a man. She promised him she could get more money from friends when she arrived in Massalia.
They departed at dawn. A fisherman's daughter, she loved the sea, and though the drumbeat and rhythmic surging of oars was far less pleasant than the tight-lashed thrumming of sails and rigging, the leap and plunge of a small boat on a close reach, the miles flowed steadily beneath the galley's shallow keel, with no thought for the fairness of the winds, and they pulled into the stone-lined port of Massalia just as the sun was setting.
Her eyes greedily scanned the waterfront, examining every detail she could rememberthe broken shutter of a yellow stone house, the placement of drying racks for fish nets, even the styles and colors of clothing worn by a group of wealthy wives haggling over fresh-caught fish.
She repressed her urge to kneel and kiss the worn stones of the wharf. She was home, truly home. Not in Citharista, but home in her own time, her own unchanged world. And she was not, definitely not, asleep or dying outside a cave many miles away, linked by a tenuous thread of life force that might snap and leave her trapped.
Alkides had been rightthe gods could be fooled. The rational nature of spells demanded adherence to the letter of their expression, not the intent of their makers. By the definition of her age, she was virgin still, and Mondradd in Mon had brought her home.