The first gray light of oncoming dawn had to fight past gathering storm clouds and a thick blanket of fog, but it still awakened magpies and hoopoes in their hidden nighttime refuges. Pierrette awakened, and poured water into Bellagos's large bowl. She murmured quiet words, and observed as her appearance changed.
Bellagos awakened at the sound of her soft voice, but he did not stir. Beneath drooping, concealing eyelids he watched as the pretty girl of the night before aged before his very eyes. Her smooth, olive skin loosened and shrivelled like an apple too long in the sun. Her eyebrows, graceful dark arcs, thickened, turning steely, dirty gray. "Illusion," he told himself. "She said it's not real." But how could that be? He could see that she was old, now. If he touched her face, would his fingers ripple across the sags and wrinkles he saw, or glide over young, virgin skin beneath the deception? Brave as he was, he was not about to try that.
"You can get up, if you want," Pierrette said. "I heard your breathing change when you awakened. I am sure your view of my . . . metamorphosis . . . was better than my own, seen in this bowl of water. What did you think of it?"
Incredibly, surprising him, tears sprang to his eyes, for he had seen a lifetime pass across that ruined face. He had seen there the fate of all lovely young girls, if they survived war and childbirth and drunken husbands . . . but he could not shape his concepts into words.
"Never mind," she said gently. "Weep for Aurinia, if you will, but not for me, because I have already lived a long lifetime as a girl, in a magic place where time is stopped, but she must live those years to become as I seem now. And those years will be as sweet or as bitter as you make themyou and that young Kraton you have not yet seen." She sighed. "Now take me back to the low town. I must ponder what I have learned, and decide what to do about it." It was starting to rain, and her rags were not proof against the cold, clammy gusts that buffeted her. Bellagos was so amazed, so shaken by what he had just seen, that he forgot entirely to ask her just what she had learned. . . .
They exited the high city without incident. At her own door at last, she bade Bellagos send for Kraton and any others of like mind whom he trusted. "Tell them to come in the afternoon," she said, "when there's a lull in this storm." He nodded, and took his leave.
So what had she learned? "The new god," Ambioros's fantôme had said. Consuming the fantômes. In another place and time, she had confronted a demon who consumed the ancient deities of springs, pools, trees, and crossroads. Christians like Father Otho called him "Satan"or did not, for the priest said it was dangerous to utter his name.
In that world, the demon had once been a petulant spirit that plagued advocates at law in Old Testament times. Some ancient writers said he was Lucifer, an angel fallen upon hard times, but he was not. He was the Eater of Gods, and every time priests drove some ancient spirit from the fold of goodness and wrote down its name in their pandemonic list, that evil one waxed stronger.
From Moloch, when that god was consumed, he gained breath like fire, that stank of yellow brimstone and hot iron. From old Sylvanus he gained a prong of immense proportions, always erect, yet without seedfor he was unable to create anything at all. From Cernunnos, the forest god of the Gauls, he took deer's horns, from Pan those of a goat, either of which he wore as occasion and mood demanded.
Had the Eater of Gods gotten his way then and there, the Black Time would have come, when all that was good was locked in a tiny box that men called the Church, because everything else was named evil, and thus belonged to him. Was this "new god" the same uncreated one? Was Teutomalos his tool in this time and place, and was his objective to bring about that other history where even the tiny ghosts of infants were harnessed to do his work? Instead of old roadside spirits, was he consuming the ghosts of men wrongly slain, their heads now stacked like cordwood or soaking in redolent oil?
Even as she considered it, Pierrette knew she was right. That was what the dryades were waiting forthere was some critical number of captive spirits, and they had not yet obtained it. When they did . . . no Roman legions, no elephants with fortresses on their backs, no great Roman engines of war designed by Archimedes's students could withstand his might. And the Romans below were waiting complacently for reinforcements, and for this well-supplied oppidum to starve and surrender.
"I wish Anselm were here," she said to Guihen, momentarily forgetting he had not, in this time, met the old sorcerer. The mage always saw through the murk of circumstance and conflicting desires to the heart of the matter at hand. Even Father Otho, who had taught her to readif only to distract her from following her mother's path and becoming a masc, a country witchwould have been a welcome sounding board for her churning ideas. Above all, she wished she could spend an hour or an afternoon in the sun-dappled beech grove by the old sacred pool, with the goddess Ma, who had set her upon this mad mission.
Perhaps Kraton, and his friends, confronted with what she had discovered, would have something to suggest. How should she appear before them? Would they have more respect for an old veleda than a young one? But no, they would have to take her for what she was. She was not Ma, whose semblance shifted with mood and circumstance. The dissenters would have to decide according to their consciences alone.
Kraton arrived first. "Though Teutomalos scorns us and does not fear us at all, we try not to be obvious when we meet." Thus the others came one by one after him, until Kraton decided no others were on the way. It was, Pierrette reflected, a pitifully small gathering, that only half filled the courtyard against the city's wall. (Though great thunderheads in the west mumbled ominously, it was not raining, and the odor of wet, oily wool was less oppressive outside than in.) She was glad to see Bellagos, standing at the rear, next to Guihen.
Kraton introduced her as the seeress Petra, who had warned the dryades of Heraclea of their flawed intentions. Because the disaster there was a decade in the past, and because she seemed so young, they took it as a credential, and did not seem to discredit her for her appearance.
Without preamble, she told them how Teutomalos would assemble enough fantômes to create a new god who would destroy the Romans not only here, but everywhere their legions marchedeven on the far side of the Alps, in the valley of the Padus, where Gallic tribesmen now worked Roman fields and swept Roman houses.
"I see nothing wrong with that," said elderly Segoboros, who had been a mercenary for the Carthaginians in Iberia, and who had once laid eyes on Scipio Africanus Aemilianus himself, though only briefly, and in the heat of battle. "Our objection has been that we didn't think Teutomalos could win, and that a few concessionsa coastal highway, for instancewould be a cheap price to pay for uninterrupted trade. . . ."
"Don't you care how that victory is gained?"
"I don't see how someone can make a god," he grumbled. "That's just a figure of speech. We have been taking the heads of our enemies for centuries, forever. And what's wrong with keeping a memento of one's father or grandfather? The Greeks and Romans, who consider themselves more civilized than us, make paintings and sculptures, but that's effete and indirect. Our way is better."
"Keeping the head of someone killed in battle is one thing, or having relatives' relics in your household shrine, to advise you about family matters, but this is different. Bellagostell them. Did you see a single familiar face in the nemeton? No, these are strangers' heads. Not enemies, not beloved kinfolk. Even at Heraclea, where they only wanted a hundred fantômes, some of the heads they took were not Gaulsseveral were Greek merchants, not even warriors."
"Greek merchants spy for Massilia. That makes them enemies, doesn't it?"
"That's Brendannos," Kraton whispered. "He used to be on the city's council before he fell into disfavor. Even then, he would contest anything, just to hear himself speak."
"Are you a Sophist, counselor?" asked Pierrette. "You sound like you studied Greek obfuscation. Does that make you an enemy too?" When several others laughed, Pierrette thought she had gained a point. "The danger," she continued, "is not just in quibbles over the identity of one fantôme or another. Teutomalos's plan is qualitatively different from your tradition. Family or enemy, the head you hang from your ridgepole is a . . . a personal thing. Someone you loved or hated, someone deserving respect. The heads in the nemeton are no more personal than that mattock leaning against the wall. Once you start using sacred things as mere tools . . ."
"You're a veleda," said Brendannos. "Prophesy for uswill we win? After all, what else matters?" Several men voiced agreement. If their choices were as black as she painted themRoman victory here at Entremont, and eventually a Roman Gaul, or else some far future horror that might not happen at all, now that they were warned . . ." Just this once, let's let Teutomalos have his way. Once the Romans are defeated, we'll insist that he cease collecting heads."
Too many others agreed. Pierrette saw that she had failed. None of them had seen the Gaulish empire that would arise, as she had. They had not felt the evil that would someday lurk in every ancient tree, the spirits in every well, every pool. They could not understandand they did not want to.
The thunderheads then fulfilled their promise, and fat raindrops began to fall in ever-increasing numbers. The wind picked up, gusting one way then another. "I'm sorry," Kraton said as his compatriots departed, one by one. "I misjudged them. They only protested when they thought we couldn't win."
"And fool that I am, I told them they could. I should have lied to them."
"Could you? You, a seeress?"
"I don't know."
"If any means justify a good end, you'd be in good company. Teutomalos . . ."
"I know," she said with a sad sigh.
"What will you do now?" Kraton asked, raising his voice to be heard over the drumming rain and the booming roar that almost immediately followed each burst of angry lightning. She heard the expectation in his voice. What did he expect her to do? With each lightning flash, her resentment also flared. Was he just like the goddess Ma, expecting her to plunge in unprepared, to engage the dryades in sorcerous combat?
"I can't tell you that. You must not count on me further. But this one thing I can say: do not let Aurinia stray far from your house. And whatever Bellagos tells you to do, do it, for the life of your grandson, your namesake, depends on it."
"My grandson? Onomaris's child?"
"No. Aurinia's child, not yet conceived. Perhaps never to be conceivedthe future is never clear, because men make choices, and what I have seen will come to pass, or will not. But this much is certain: if the Romans are victorious here, and if Bellagos heeds the words I have spoken to him, then you will have a grandson and his name will be Kraton, and he will live in a fanciful place where all men are good, because evil was banished from it thousands of years ago and cannot return."
She turned away from him, still angry, and he took that as dismissal. "I don't understand, but your requirements seem simple enough, and I will heed them." He sighed, bent as if the weight of the nemeton's square stone pillars was on his back, and he could not bear them up. "Good fortune, veleda. And thank you for trying." He departed, leaving Pierrette gazing fixedly at the rain-drenched courtyard bounded by the city's wall.