The old gods are not especially clever, and they can sometimes be tricked by mortals, but gods are manifestations of more fundamental principles, and those are immutable. Even gods cannot cirvumvent them. Better to abandon the gods (which we ourselves create to explain why things are as they are) and instead to study those immutable principles.
Otho, Bishop of Nemausus
The Sorceress's Tale
Citharista bathed in miraculous sunshine reflected through clean, pine-scented air from white rock and azure ocean. Would she see the first sign of change, or would she change with it, remembering nothing of a past no longer hers?
She found herself looking closely at familiar things, like the incised Roman letters on the stable's old stone blocks. Had the inscriptions, belonging to the old reality, begun to fade?
"There you are," she said. The buff-and-white donkey rolled his large, brown eyes. "Yes, you." She reached for a rope halter. "It's time to earn your oats."
The beast sidled away.
"Gustave!"
Reluctantly, the donkey allowed itself to be haltered. Pierrette draped wicker panniers across its skinny back. One, she filled with cloth sacks of grain, and the other with a thick wool blanket, a cooking pot, two jugs of wine that would serve as canteens later, clothes, and simple fooddry cheese, salted mullet, olives, figs, bread, and a fat sausage.
On the way through town, she did not look up from beneath the brim of her conical straw hat, afraid of what she mightor might notsee. When Citharista was a scattering of red-roofed miniatures below, she did not look back, afraid she might see the shadows of great machines, enormous engines that could lift a cargo-laden ship like a child's toy, visions of the Black Time.
The road north of the town led only past isolated farmhouses. In each succeeding valley, a trail joined it, and her road became wider and well-trodden.
On every ridge-top, and again in each valley, she uttered the words of a small, simple spell. In Citharista or Anselm's keep, it was a fire-lighting spell. In other places, it caused a glow like marsh light or a white, heatless glare. On high ridges, the spell had no effect. She used it to warn herself when the magic of a region changed, because innocuous spells sometimes became dangerous, where their postulates meant something the writer had not intended. High ranges stifled spells, and if there were to be a change in magics, it would be on the far side of a ridge. Thus far, the hills had not been high enough. She had not needed flint and steel to light her fire, the first night out.
There were few other travellers. When she heard someone ahead, she hid until they passed. For all she knew, others did the same when they heard her first. Sometimes she felt eyes upon her back.
She encountered a carter in a narrow defile. His wain was heaped with hay, and she could pass only by squeezing close by his cart.
He had a fatherly face. "Climb up, girl. Old Brownie won't notice he's pulling a bit more."
Her sandalled feet burned from two days' walking. Still holding Gustave's lead, she put a foot on a spoke. The carter grasped her arm and lifted herone broad hand cupping her buttocks. "Soft little thing, aren't you?" He seemed less fatherly.
He climbed up beside her and, grasping his switch pole, goaded his mule. Ahead, the roadway widened. He laid the pole against the wain's side posts. "Brownie knows the way," he said, laying down the reins. "Come here now."
Grasping a handful of her skirt, he pulled her toward himself. The slippery hay offered no purchase. She could not pull free. She felt a calloused hand under her loose blouse, and cool air and sunlight on her exposed legs. His weight pinned her into the deep hay.
He struggled to get his rope belt loose and still keep her from getting away. Pierrette's mind raced. He thought it only rape but, deflowered, she would be no more a sorceress than her mother. She would fail. The Black Time would come. She whispered soft words.
"What?"
Her nostrils widened. "I said, `Your hay is on fire.' "
"Hah! Are you that hot?" He reached between her thighs. "I'll quench you."
His mule and Gustave brayed, and the cart lurched. The carter raised his head, cursing. Both beasts' nostrils flared, and their eyes were wide. Sharp, white smoke billowed from the hay.
He leaped to calm his mule, and Pierrette rolled off the cart. She flung herself belly-down across Gustave. The donkey honked loudly, and half carried, half dragged her away. A hundred paces down the track she got her feet under herself.
The carter was pulling armloads of hay from his wain. Pierrette saw billows of smoke, but no fire. She hoped his entire cartload would burst into flame.
A mile down the trail, she watched the smoke pinch out at its base, the column thrashing like an angry snake's tail. She had gotten her wishdry hay in full flame gives off little smoke, but the heat of it still rises. Then she felt sorry. The man surely had family, who would suffer for his loss.
She camped early that afternoon, off the trail a distance. She shook out coarse woolen bracae, Frankish trousers, and donned a grayed cotton tunicboy's clothing. She should have done it at the start.
The baggy bracae were less loose than a year before, but her hips had not widened too much. Her small breasts pressed against the fabric across them. In the morning, she would bind them with cloth torn from her skirt, and would tie her hair atop her head in a soldier's coif. Her floppy hat would cover it.
There was a village at the intersection of the stone-paved Roman road and her trail. She skirted it and crossed the Roman road. She had expected traffic, and was not wrongbut it was all one way. A steady trickle of carts, mounted men, and folk afoot headed eastward, none west.
Where her chosen trail led north toward a cleft in the next range of hills, rough mule teamsters had kindled a fire. One hailed her to join them. She shook her head. Beyond were a man, woman, and two children. She approached their fire instead.
She had checked her appearance that morning, using wine poured into her pot for a mirror. She looked boyish enough.
"Are you from the coast?" asked the man, a sleeping baby on his lap. "Are things as bad there?"
"What do you mean by `bad?' "
The man glanced toward his wife and their older child, a boy of three or four. When he saw that the child slept, he spoke. "There are demons," he whispered. "They've taken Aix." Ecks? Ohhe had slurred "Aquae Sextiae" into a single syllable. Was that how languages changed . . . ? She should write that in her journal, when she returned to the cape. If she returned . . .
"Have you seen them yourself?"
His eyes filled with tears. "My brother has become one," he said.
With gentle urging, Pierrette encouraged him to tell her that tale.
The brothers Barcos and Cotos shared their father's farm, a wife, and two children. There had been no strife until Cotos took their olives to market. He returned covered in mud, sullen, and would not say what had transpired.
One night later, when it was Cotos's turn to lie with Dosia, she fled the little cabane, and sought Barcos, who was sleeping warm among the pigs. "Cotos desired an unnatural thing," she said, but would not describe it.
In the morning Barcos remonstrated with his brother. "It isn't your affair," said Cotos, "what I do with my wife."
"She's my wife too."
"Last night she was mine."
When the brothers went to their grove, they worked apart, neither holding the ladder for the other.
Days passed.
"Where did you get that?" Dosia asked Cotos. It was a battered bronze sword, an ancient thing. Cotos was sharpening it with a stone. He muttered something unintelligible.
"What did you say?"
"Are you deaf?" he growled.
She backed away, not having understood him at all. His words were foreign and harsh. That night she did not go to bed. Cotos had to find her. He had stiffened his blond hair into spikes with white clay. He dragged her to the tiny hut and raped her brutally.
Next day, he put on a pitted iron helmet. He would not say where he had gotten iteven had he tried, neither Dosia nor Barcos could have understood him. Strangely, he was angry with them, as if they were the ones who no longer spoke intelligibly. Odder still, little Galbos, probably Cotos's offspring, understood him, so they were able to continue with the work of the farm.
When the last olives were in, Cotos donned his rusty helm and, sword in hand, made as if to leave. He had packed food in a scrap of cloth. "Wend'h 'hra teutos malos rheeks," he said.
"What did he say?" asked Dosia of her small son.
"He's going to find some people's hammer," said Galbos.
"We don't own a hammer," Barcos mused.
Cotos set off on the road to Aix. Perhaps the hammer he sought was in the grave where he had found the sword and helm.
"Where will you go?" asked Pierrette.
"Away. Anywhere." Barcos shrugged. "It doesn't matter. A flux took the pigs, and the olives will endure until we can return."
The boy Galbos had awakened. He saw Pierrette, and said something that his parents could not decipher. Pierrette responded in the same tongue. After that, both parents stared at her with such unease that she got to her feet, and bid them farewell. She was no longer welcome there.
Barcos was right, she reflected as she put the crossroads and the wide valley behind herself. It did not matter where they went. The blight would follow them. She and little Galbos had spoken in Gaulish, a dead language. Pierrette had learned old tongues in order to read Anselm's books, but the child should not have known it.
What Cotos had said was also Gaulish: "I am going to King Teutomalos," he had said. "Teutomalos" might mean "Hammer of the Tribe," but it was a proper name. "Rheeks"Rixmeant "king." Teutomalorix. The king who, according to Diodorus Siculus, had been defeated by Calvinus at Entremontor who had defeated him.
Those poor folk of Gaulish ancestry (as were most people in Provence) could not escape themselves, their blood. Cotos succumbed first, but already little Galbos spoke better Gaulish than Oc, the debased Latin of the formerly Roman Gaul. If Rome had never conquered in the first place, then Latin would never be spoken here, except by traders from across the Alps.
Pierrette slept poorly, and was glad when dawn at last lightened the crest of the mount where Marius had won (or lost?) his battle with the Teutons.
Was she nearing Aquae Sextiae? The mountain's distinctive white limestone scarp was a long, bright line on the northern horizon. The peak was a beacon, visible from any bare hilltop. From ancient times people had oriented themselves by it. By the time she approached the bishop's seat, the massif would be east of her and, seen end-on, should resemble a crooked triangular peak. She still had far to go.
Magic had not changed. Her fire-spell still lit her tinder when she stopped for the night, between two hills, looking down upon the Via Julia Augusta, as that portion of the main road between Italia and Iberia was called. Moonlight washed the Roman paving stones white. Campfires flickered.
There were dozens of people down there, with carts and wains heaped high with the miscellany of farm and household: refugees. She did not need them to tell her how bad things were. She could feel the old, angry, Gaulish spirits that brooded in the hillsides, in gnarled old trees no Romans had ever cut. In her world, Caesar's men had hacked and burned such sacred trees when he outlawed the druids, and Christians had completed his task.
Screams and the rumble of hooves awakened her. She crawled to the edge of the slope. Swords glinted. Shadowy folk ran this way and that. Plumes of feathers and horsehair bobbed atop bronze-trimmed helms.
A warrior rode down a child. A single swipe of his long sword took head from shoulders. The Gaul gave a harsh cry, and leaned from his horse to sweep up the rolling head.
Pierrette backed away, and vomited her meager supper. By the time she recovered, there were no more cries. The moon had sunk behind the western hills, and below was darkness. An unseasonal drizzle drifted down. The only sounds were Gustave's mumbled complaints.
At the first wan light, she shook out her blanket and loaded Gustave. She did not feel like eating, but she forced down a soggy crust.
She had to cross the Roman road; that meant going through the refugees' camp. Still forms lay amid the wreckage of the camp, but there were no sounds. They were all dead. Men, women, babes . . . all headless, even the littlest ones. Again she vomited.
Eyes brimming, she eyed the hard-surfaced road. The mountain was invisible in the mist, but Aquae Sextiae could not be more than six or seven miles west. What would she find there? The bishop's city, with warm fountains and sunny streets . . . or a Gallic fane below the looming walls of an Entremont grown large, a city never vanquished, that had never known Rome?
Something was nagging at her. Something she had seen in the horror of the refugee camp? She forced herself to look. The headless bodies of children were just dark lumps.
That was it. Gauls took the heads of fighting men. Warrior fantômes were powerful. But children? What use had Celtic druidae for the captive ghosts of infants? It made no sense.
The clatter of hoofbeats startled her. With nowhere to hide, she stood frozen as a single horseman reined in, his long Celtic spatha bared. His horse's nostrils flared at the scent of blood. The rider looked anxious. He was afraid. Of her?
"Who are you?" His blade wavered between them. He spoke Gaulish.
"I'm called Pierrette," she replied in that tongue.
"You're not . . . with these?" He indicated the sprawled, headless refugees.
"I just arrived from the south. I camped up there, and I heard the sounds in the night. . . . I came down to see what had happened to these people."
"People? These aren't people, they're demons."
"They don't look it. That one's a child."
"An imp." He accepted that she was not a "demon"because she spoke Gaulish? "They appear out of nowhere, speaking the evil Romish tongue. They worship a horrid dead god who hangs on a tree. If not demons, they are mad. If not demonsthen where did they come from?"
Pierrette's mind raced. This Gaulish soldier thought the refugees were demons? Just as such ordinary folk thought the fantômes were? But of coursethis was the new history that she now inhabited. The soldier was in his own world. The refugees were the apparitions here.
"I'm taking you to my wanak," he said, almost apologetically. "He'll want to hear what you can tell him of the south. By the look of you, you're a Ligure, aren't you?"
"My mother was." Ligures had inhabited Provence before Gauls or Romans. In her world they were considered fairy-folk, and lived in remote places. Was it different here and now? Did her mother's people have it better here?
Wanak? In the Greek of Homer, wanax meant "king." Was she to meet a Gaulish king?
"I have little to tell," she lied. "I met no one on the trail from my father's farm. I saw nothing but rocks and treesuntil this."
"Nonetheless," he replied. "Come." She led Gustave, and followed him eastward, not toward the town.
She walked and he rode. She prodded him with casual-seeming questions, and got some idea of the changes in this world. Teutomalos the Eighth ruled an empire of Gauls and Germans. The capital had not been at Entremont for generations, but was in the north. The empire stretched from the Alps to the northern sea, from the Atlantic to the great marshes of the central continent.
Things were much as she had imagined, had there been no Rome. The only thing she could not have imagined was . . . the heads. The children's heads. Had the religion of the druidae become so corrupt? The warriorSegomarosdid not know what the priests did with the heads. "I don't want to know," he said.
After a mile, realizing she could not keep up, Segomaros pulled Pierrette up behind him. She tried to imagine herself riding behind Diodorébut he was in another world. Was it goneor had she merely passed some unseen line, up in the hills? Might Citharista, Diodoré, and Anselm still exist, if she fled back that way?
For some time, she had been catching whiffs of a foetid odor, as if something large had died at no great distance. They rode on and on, at a walk, and the stench thickened. Was there another field of slaughter nearbyone days or a week older than the one she had seen earlier?
When she looked, she saw that the mountain called Holy Victory was now an elongated scarp, white teeth gnawing at the horizon, more west than north. Then she knew what the nauseous odor was: she was near the campi putridi, the "stinking fields" where Marius had fought the Teutons and had, in this universe, been defeated. The malodorous swamp had been drained in her own "history," and no longer stank, but here . . . When the battle had gone against the Romans, had they fled to the swamp? Were the "stinking fields" the Gauls' victory monument, as the mountain had been . . . might have been . . . Marius's?
There had been a Gallic oppidum, a hill-city, near the campi putridi, and when she saw hills rising ahead, she knew their destination was near. But before they reached the hills, a sentry stepped out from sheltering rocks. Segomaros explained his mission in a spatter of rapid Gaulish Pierrette could barely follow.
The sentry gestured with a thumb. "The captain"wanak meant captain, not king"will return at dusk. Take her to the south entrance, and wait there."
They skirted the camp. Segomaros handed her down from the horse. "Wait over there," he said. "I'll get something for you to eat and drink." He rode into the camp.
"What shall I do now?" she asked Gustave, who only snuffled as he tried to reach the pannier that held his oats. What could she do? Had she already lost the battle against the Black Time, before she had begun to strive? The drizzle continued unabated. She found a dry spot beneath a platane's spreading branches, and sat down to wait.
The sun had just set, and the gloom was deep. Had she drowsed? She heard voices a way off. "Where is she?" boomed a voice that echoed as if from a deep well.
"I left her here, Wanak. She must be nearby."
"She is one of them," said the captain, who wore a hooded mantle. "She cast an enchantment on you."
Pierrette edged backward into thorny brush. She looped Gustave's lead so it would not drag. "Go now!" she whispered. The donkey ambled away.
Someone lit a torch. The sappy wood cast an ugly orange light. Segomaros and three others stopped under the platane. "She was here. See? Donkey shit." The wanak took the torch, and bent downward.
Then Pierrette saw. Her heart hammered dangerously loud in her ears. The wanak had no face. Beneath cowl and helm was only darkness. Couldn't Segomaros see that? Or . . . didn't he care? The wanak was a fantôme.
The torch dazzled the searchers and left concealing pools of shadow. She remained absolutely still, hardly breathing. The men moved on.
There was no moon. She pushed through the brush, using the flickers of firelight from the camp as her guide. There was a trail, but all too soonshe could not have gone a mileit petered out. Then she found it again. It had made a complete turnaround, traversing the slope upward in a series of hairpin bends. She would have to walk a mile for every quarter-mile of height she gained, but she did not dare scramble directly upward in the darkness. She plodded on, numb with exhaustion and chill.
When gray dawn edged westward toward her, the sky was still overcast, but she could see to climb straight uphill, over the tumbled rocks. Was there a pass through the forbidding scarp ahead? There had to be, or there would be no switchbacksthat was a trail for laden beasts, not men afoot. It had to cross over. She pressed on, panting, reeling. She had hardly slept for two nights.
"There she is!" Somethingan arrowclattered on the rocks above. She kept climbing. Arrows rattled beside her, behind her. The horsemen were following the trail; their steeds could not master the rocky slopes directly. Arrows clattered behind her, so she guessed she was gaining. She looked back. Two dismounted men were scrambling up after her.
For the dozenth time, she crossed the trail, but now it headed directly south, through a steep cleft. She found a loose, round stone beside the track, and rolled it downward. It rattled and clacked as it went, not slowing at all. "Watch out!" someone yelled.
She hurried on, keeping her eye out for more cobbles. There were squarish ones, and sharp-edged slabs, but no round ones. She was so tired. She could not go much farther. Her breath came and went in gasps. Sweat blurred her vision. The cleft ended in a brush-filled cul-de-sac. Loose twigs and brush collected there, out of the wind and drizzle. She stopped, and wiped her eyes.
There was a pole with lashed rungs. She scrambled toward it, and put one foot on the lowest crosspiece. It twisted, and her foot thumped on the ground. She would have to pull herself up by her arms, and only put her weight on both sides of the crosspieces at once.
Voices echoed between the walls of the cleft. She scrambled upward. Her arms felt like they would pull from her shoulders. She was sure to fall.
"There she is!"
She was over the top. The Gauls were running the last hundred paces to the ladder. She tried to pull it up after her, but could not. She murmured the words of her fire-spell, twisting a tuft of coarse grass. It lit, and she tossed it down. A wisp of smoke puffed from the tangled brush, then . . . nothing. It had gone out. She looked for another clump of dry stuff, but found none.
Weeping with frustration, she got to her feet, to stagger on. She kicked at the pole ladder, and it fell awayinto an almost invisible sheet of hot flames. Sparks flew.
"Watch out! Everything's burning." The foremost Gauls pushed back against the rest. The fire spread. Flames rose from the ladder pole. The rungs' lashings flared brightly, then fell away. The flame had not gone out: it burned so hotly there was still almost no smoke at all. Pierrette sank upon the stony ground at the top of the pass, and wept.
The Gauls had given up. She saw a line of tiny men on toy horses, heading away. Somewhere down there was Gustave, and her few remaining supplies. Thirsty, she sucked sweat from the cloth that had bound her hair. Below, on the far side of the spinelike ridge, was a broad valley, a green, tree-clad vale. There would be water there, amidst greenery as rich as the grove of the sacred pool.