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Chapter 8 - The Dryades

Enakles's servant rode ahead to give the Heracleans time to prepare a proper welcome. The road passed east of the town's looming walls, white stone ramparts glowing brilliantly in the noon light. The fields on either side of the road were lush, already full of summer's promise, and the soil between neat rows of crops was dark and rich. It was no wonder that the Gauls had located a city and a sanctuary there or that the Greeks had chosen it for their entrepôt.

Coming in sight of the city walls, Pierrette pulled her veil up over her face, and shook out her mantle, pinning it with the gold fibulae and chain, as Belisama had showed her. Four men awaited them at a new gate set between projecting ramparts. They wore white ceremonial robes over Celtic bracae and laced tunics. Was Enakles's arrival a ceremonial occasion? Was hers?

"Do you bring the god's blessing?" asked the tallest dryade.

"I do," Enakles replied solemnly. "I bring also the mor'h-ganna Petra, a devotee of the goddess Veleda. She has seen these walls in a future time, when all now living are dust." That caught the dryades' attention. "Mohr'-ganna" meant "great seeress," a title not lightly given.

One of the four—the only one with white hair—addressed her in a fatherly voice. "Welcome, seeress. I am Ortagion. Your presence honors us. We look forward to hearing all that you have foreseen." The other three remained silent—a portly, graying man, another whose broad shoulders and erect posture denoted a soldiering past, and a fourth . . . His cowled robe shadowed his features, revealing only a beaky nose and the gleam of sharp, dark eyes.

He was no fantôme, but his demeanor gave Pierrette a chill.

"I'll be happy to recount my scryings for you," she replied. Though not for the reasons you may expect.

The crowd inside the gate was reverently silent. The god's blessing upon their city walls was a matter of life. Most were Gauls in bracae and tunics, with colorful sagi over their shoulders—plaid with fine red lines crisscrossing the larger green and brown squares, the design favored by the Avaticii tribe. Greeks in pleated white kilts stood out like ducks among magpies.

"Come," said her dryade host, when they reached the edge of the crowd. "We have prepared a proper dwelling for you."

"How kind," she replied, gazing at the neat row houses, their walls plastered and washed with white lime, their stone sills lifting flagged floors inches above the cobbled street. Doors and shutters were mostly ajar, because it was daytime, and quite warm.

Unlike Citharista, few roofs were tiled. Instead, low parapets surmounted projecting pole rafters. Flat roofs were like sunny outdoor rooms, busy now as women washed clothes and spread slices of fruits out to dry. In springtime, she reflected, when the Mistral blew down Rhodanus's valley, the houses would be chilly and damp, and their tile drain gutters would be hard put to cope with midwinter rains.

The dryade Ortagion stopped. Their course had been leftward along the new city wall. Now before Pierrette was a stone staircase that led up the side of the wall. "What is this?" she asked, suddenly suspicious.

Ortagion lowered his head as if ashamed. "Your residence, seeress. The tower."

Her eyes moved up . . . and up. The staircase led to a walkway atop the wall. Another flight led higher still, to a timbered landing a full story above the crenelations, and from there, a leaning ladder gave access to the tower's flat roof.

"I would prefer somewhere else," she said, uneasily.

The soldierly dryade spoke. "You claim to be Veleda's gutuatra. Her avatars have always chosen to live in towers."

"Anyplace else would be unthinkable, mor'h-ganna," said the fat dryade. "The people would think you an impostor if you slept in an ordinary house." His words had an oily feel. What did they have in mind for her? The threat was clear: if she did not accept their choice, an isolated, windowless room, they would brand her a fraud—and what was the penalty for impersonating a goddess's speaker?

"I only meant that there are no windows," she said, thinking quickly. "I'm not a bat, to live in the dark."

The soldierly dryade pulled a dagger from his belt and dug at the mortar. "Enakles!" he growled.

"Yes, Ambioros?"

"This mortar's still soft. Send men up there to cut a window for the mor'h-ganna."

"I'll have it done shortly," the architect said, fawning.

"It must face the sea, else the odors of the town . . ."

"Of course." Enakles scurried off to rally his workmen.

So, Pierrette thought. She was to be isolated high above the edge of the town, with a view only of fields and lagoons. Even from the doorway, she would see nothing but the northern stretch of wall leading to the main gate. There was reason behind that, beyond Veleda's requirement. She shrugged. She could always climb the ladder to the roof, to survey the town.

"Take me to the nemeton," she said abruptly. "I'll pay respect to your city gods, and will return here when the workmen's dust has been swept." She glared at Ortagion, who seemed least hostile of the four.

"Just so," he agreed. "We'll show you the extent of our proud new walls, and on the way back . . ." He was stalling. Why? She must not let them have the initiative.

"Don't toy with me!" she snapped. She swept her arm upward along the stonework. "I have seen these walls fallen, your city destroyed, and the roots of great trees amid the broken stones . . ."

"Say no more!" blurted the fat one. "Not here! We'll take you to the gods' sanctum."

"My walls will not fall," protested Enakles.

"I have had three visions," she stated. "In only one have the walls fallen. But I'll speak of them only after I have visited the nemeton, the sanctuary."

Three visions. It was no lie. While asleep aboard Caius's boat, she had treaded Heraclea's streets as she did now, in clumsy sandals, her face veiled. The walls had stood, manned by soldiers . . . and by fantômes, the spirits of the city's heroic dead.

The second vision, the fallen walls, was the Ugium of her day, its defenses sapped first by Rome, then again by Abd al Rahman's Moors, and never rebuilt in her time.

The third was a waking dream born of her fears of the Black Time, of metal-walled prisons the color of old blood, of living flames within and the stink of death without, carried on the smoke.

But she would tell those tales in her own way and time, to serve her own purpose—or she would not; it remained to be seen. She would visit the nemeton, and wait for her quarters to be readied.

Ortagion led her westward toward the center of the town. The other dryades . . . no, only Ambioros and the fat one . . . followed. Where had the sinister cowled man gone?

"There is the Herakleon of the Greeks," the dryade said. "Come, I'll show you . . ."

"Later, perhaps," she replied firmly. "That would be unseemly. I must call on the gods of the Avaticii first."

"Of course, seeress. It is this way. . . ."

It was not. They crossed a wide way where five carts could pass abreast. There the narrow street resumed, and led out into a wide ahoras, a marketplace. Did the dryades hope to distract her with jars of wine and sweetmeats, with bolts of fine red and blue silks from the farthest East? Why were they keeping her from the sanctuary? Was that where the fourth dryade had gone? She should have figured it out earlier.

The major east-west street was paved in fine split basalt cobbles, quarried many miles away. The nemeton would be on the city's finest street. Was that it? That edifice with the red tile roof that glowed like fire in the noon light?

She turned angrily from Ortagion to a boy selling apples. "Where is the gods' house?" The child pointed back the way they had come, along the broad way.

"It seems I can find my way about your city more easily than you can," she said to the dryades. She strode off.

"I'm sorry," Ortagion said, hurrying to catch up. "Cunotar went ahead to prepare the gods' sanctum for your visit."

"To sweep the floor, you mean? To dust off the statues?" What were they hiding? What would she not see, when she got there?

Nearing the red-roofed place, Pierrette stopped abruptly, feeling something unpleasant, as if she had just passed through a cloud of noxious air. As if something had died. But there were no odors except the scent of food cooking, of garbage left a little too long, of a chamberpot not carried to the oubliette at cliff's edge, where the wall was low. What was it? What had made her uneasy?

" 'Ganna?" enquired Ortagion.

"Is that the nemeton?" She pointed at an iron-bound door. In her head, she heard desparing wails, souls tormented and angry. "Nemeton" meant "a grove." How different these Gauls' holy places had become from Ma's glade . . .

"That's the back way. It's barred. We're going around the corner to the front—but how did you know?"

"I sense spirits in anguish. Someone raging, unkindly bound. What have you been doing there?"

Ortagion would not meet her eyes. "Please, mor'h-ganna. Don't judge us yet. All will be explained."

The sanctum of the Gaulish gods was open to the street: squared stone columns supporting lintels, which held sloping pole rafters and red roof tiles, the only ones she had seen here. From the darkness within, she heard a squeal and a heavy thud as of a massive door closing. Abruptly, the horrid voices in her head ceased. What had they been? What hideous things were the dryades doing?

But now all was tranquil. Had she imagined it? This was, after all, a holy place. . . . She steeled herself to enter.

She must not show what she felt. Deeply carved into pillar and lintel were ovate niches. Some were dark holes the size of large melons, and empty. Some were not. . . .

She found herself drawn to a human face. Its leathery skin was dark, shiny with oil that smelled like crushed cypress needles. Eyelids stretched tight over sunken orbs were sewn shut with fine black thread, painted with white lime, then dabbed with powdered blue copper salt—false irises that gave an expression of wide-eyed surprise. A startling shock of pale yellow hair, blond at the roots, was stiffened into bunches with lime. It pushed out from the niche around the head. Beneath a blond, trimmed moustache were lips sewn shut, stretched now as they dried in the bright sunlight.

The sense of horror she had expected did not materialize. This was not the spirit she had felt, before. She felt rightness, a firm, calm resolve, as if the warrior's ghost was atop the wall, alert for danger to its city, but sensing no cause for alarm. The children in the streets he guarded need fear nothing that day.

"A good man," she said softly. "He watches from your walls." All four dryades drew hissing breaths of surprise. This was no arrogant country dryade.

"He is Velarix," said Ortagion. "He led our soldiers for twenty years." Velarix. King Vela, or Velarion. That was as it should be. A king's place was with his people, in life and death. How different was a head steeped in oil of cedar from Saint Claire's bones, lovingly wrapped in fine wool within P'er Otho's reliquary?

There were other niches, mostly empty, and other heads, but Pierrette forced herself to ignore them. She was as disconcerted by her sudden perceptions as the dryade was impressed by them. But there—set in the long rear wall—was the iron-bound door she had heard close. What had they hidden behind it? She thought she knew, but now was not the time to confront it. She looked around . . .

Within the nemeton, statues of mail-clad warriors stood or knelt, some with the heads of vanquished enemies in hand, beneath a raised foot, or balanced on a knee. There were no statues of women, but that stood to reason. This was a city temple, and Ma was no lover of the stone warrens men built upon her high places.

Pierrette recognized Taranis, holding the serpent Lightning, his hair like black, roiling thunderheads. That triggered a memory, which erupted unbidden. . . .

* * *

Black clouds mounted the horizon, swirling, twisting, darkening the foam-tipped waves of the world-river Oceanos. The young woman's fingers tapped a rhythm on the gilded arms of her throne. "Come, Taranis," she said. "Venet Taran'." She laughed, and raised her fingers. Storm winds whipped her long black hair. Lightning glittered from her fingertips, and leaped toward the swelling clouds.

Beside her was another throne—and a man. Black, oiled curls tumbled to his shoulders and intermingled with gold ornaments about his neck. Flashes from the approaching storm highlighted his features. "Enough! Send it away." He laughed without condescension.

She waved a hand as if dismissing a servant. Lightning ceased, winds abated, the sky lightened, and distant currents of air pulled at the anvil-clouds, tearing wisps from their tops, dissipating them.

"There! Your Fortunate Isles are again at peace. See what a terrible disruption I would be?"

"Better storms with you than life without," exclaimed the sorcerer-king Minho. "Marry me! Rule with me!"

* * *

"Mor'h-ganna? Are you all right?" She realized that she had sagged to her knees beside Taranis's image. The dryade Ortagion leaned over her.

"I don't command the visions," she murmured. "They come when they will."

"What did you see?"

"A far place. A kingdom long departed, that may yet endure when this world is no longer." Oracles' words, ambiguous. Ortagion drew back.

"Be easy," she assured him. "That vision doesn't concern you, or this place." Not directly.

* * *

Twice she had spoken with Minho of the Isles. That memory had been of the first time: she had been only a child when Ma had first swirled the waters of the sacred pool and shown her herself on that throne. She had not understood what it meant. For the second meeting, she had arrived on a cloud-chariot of her own conjuration, wearing green of tamarisk, gold of spring irises, and a dress teased from a tuft of passing cloud. Her slippers had been moon-traced silver plucked from the water of the Camargue. It was her test, her "graduation" from masc to incipient sorceress. The spells had been difficult, complex, and dangerous.

"I missed you," Minho had said. "It's been so long, so many centuries. Have you come to stay, at last? . . . I've yearned for you while great nations rose and fell."

She had not understood. She was not yet fifteen. No nations had fallen in those short years.

His arms about her had been warm and strong, his stolen kiss troubling, tempting. She had flung herself away and, as a raucous magpie, had fled Minho's palace on iridescent wings.

* * *

Why those memories? Why now? She sighed. It was time to get down to the business that had brought her here.

"I don't have a Great Year to learn history and mysteries," she said. "There's no time, but there is much the goddess commanded me to learn." She stood, shakily. Ortagion took her arm.

"We will speak of that, but not today, mor'h-ganna. Come. I'll call for a litter to take you to your tower."

* * *

The bed's coverlet was fine white wool. Moonlight from the newly cut window was as cool as the night breeze off the sea. The air was sweet, high above the odors of the town. She fell atop the pristine bed wrapped in her sagus, her travelling cloak, and was instantly asleep.

Thankfully, she did not dream—or if she did, no traces lingered when the sun's warmth and the bustle in the streets below awakened her.

* * *

Veleda's tradition demanded Pierrette neither judge nor prophesy outside the walls of her tower. Though she considered her confinement to be the dryade Cunotar's trap, neither was she comfortable amid the statues and brooding spirits of the nemeton. Before the sun was high, the four dryades came to her.

"I don't know what I need to know," she said. "I'll know what it is when I hear it. You must teach me—everything."

"Even for the most talented of us, that takes nineteen years."

"Ortagion, nineteen months will be too late."

The other three dryades had kept silent until now. Sabinos, the youngest (perhaps the least patient) cleared his throat meaningfully. "Tell us your visions—the fate of our city," he said. "Then we may know what to teach you."

She sighed. She most wanted to know about fantômes, and trapped spirits who raged. But Ortagion had temporized in the nemeton, and had acted uneasy, even ashamed. She could not approach the subject directly. Besides, their choice among the paths her visions indicated would not necessarily be the same as hers.

"Then hear my most frightening vision," she intoned. "Your city's walls encompass the salins and lagoons that surround it. Its walls are woven iron, and whoever touches them dies. There are no houses, no temples, only metal places that hum with the voices of demented things. They are lit by lamps without flame, and by iron torches higher and wider than my tower, that burn without smoke and leave no ash. Men slave within those precincts. There is no day, no night, only gray skies in which no sun can be seen."

"What lies beyond the walls?" asked Sabinos.

"Bare dirt, wind-blown ash, and the burnt stumps of long-dead trees. There are no wells or pools, only puddles in which the dead lie unburied, and do not rot." She shuddered. "That is my vision. That is the Black Time at the beginning, and at the end."

Ambioros, the tallest dryade, had a warrior's mien and abruptness. "What path leads there? What must we do to choose another?"

At least he had not asked "When?" Might he choose to ignore a fate that would not take place in his lifetime or his grandchildren's? But dryades were philosophers and scholars, judges and astronomers. Their traditions descended from the same tribes who, beyond the River Indus, had become the Brahmin caste. The Greeks of their day respected them, as would Roman scholars to come. Their thinking spanned ages. They should care.

"If the Romans come, and conquer," she said, "a new religion will arise, whose priests divide all things between good and evil, and find more things evil than good. Left unchecked, that will lead to the Black Time, once all has been divided."

"The Massiliotes treat with Rome," Sabinos remarked. "There was the matter of the pirates of Aegitna, and the Roman fleet has controlled our coasts for a Great Year, even before their consul Opimus defeated the Oxubii and the Deciates, our allies. But our walls can withstand them."

Ortagion was not as sure. "Hannibal shocked the Romans," he mused. "Though they defeated him at last, and now have levelled Carthage, they have not forgotten how close he came—with our help. We allowed his elephants to cross the Alps from Iberia to the Padane valley, on our roads. Romans see us as a barrier between their divided holdings."

"We give their merchants passage along the coast," Ambioros said.

"But their armies? Do we permit their legions to march where they will? No. But less will not satisfy them. When next our Iberian kin rebel, Rome will require a land route from Latium. . . .

Pierrette did not want to waste time on political or military matters, but she realized that such issues were at the root of the problem, and could not be ignored—only steered in a direction more useful to her. Whatever evil they planned, that she had sensed at the nemeton, would be done with only the best motives: to preserve and protect their city, their way of life, from Rome's legions. They believed it would work—and it would, unless her terrifying experience east of Aquae Sextiae was only an insane vision . . . And unless this "now" was also a delusion. . . .

"You have the means of defeating Rome," she said, "but it will not forstay the Black Time's coming. It will only change the path taken—and the nature of your victory will be evil itself."

Ortagion and Sabinos avoided her eye. Ambioros drew himself up in stiff defiance. Cunotar, the fourth dryade, remained expressionless. Of the four, he made her uneasiest: his name meant "Taranis's hound." The storm god for whom he spoke made few distant rumblings before he struck. And he had still not removed his shadowing hood.

They all knew what evil she spoke of. It had to do with the ghosts they kept in the sanctuary—not the fantômes of the Avaticii tribe, like Velarix, but ones like the bitter, chafing spirit she had briefly sensed, approaching the nemeton. But she did not know enough about such ghosts to prod the dryades further without giving herself away.

Her "three visions" were not equivalent; that was a problem. One was her own world, in which ulitmate dissolution loomed, but had not yet come. The vision of the iron towers of the Black Time itself was the only possible outcome of several courses of events, themselves yet undetermined.

The dream of Ugium, dominated and defended by bitter ghosts, was perhaps the same universe she had fled from on the slopes of Sainte-Baume.

She had no knowledge of other possibilities. What would the end of the universe be, if there were no Black Time? There was no possibility of such an alternative, except within the chain of events that she called "my own history."

Ambioros got to his feet. "I will come back when you know what you wish to learn from me." Cunotar also rose.

Sabinos glanced from the departees to Ortagion, who remained seated. "I'll help if I can," he said, "but Ambioros is right—you'll have to formulate questions before we can answer them." He departed, shuffling his sandals on the stone steps down the cityward face of the square tower.

"We're at an impasse." Ortagion made no move to leave. "You aren't willing to reveal what you don't know by asking questions, but you sense things that trouble us, that we won't speak of."

"You're afraid of what you're doing," Pierrette replied. "You've chosen an end—victory over the Massiliotes and their Roman friends—but you're uncomfortable with your chosen means." She saw she had struck a nerve. "You're experimenting with those fantômes, aren't you? You're using the dead for worldly ends."

Ortagion's expression revealed the accuracy of her thrust. "We can't be sure . . ."

"Oh, you can win your immediate battle," she interrupted him. "I've seen that—the tribes of Gaul, united with the Teuton tribes north of the Rhine, can become a great empire. Rome will lose Iberia and Africa, will retreat to the plain of Latium, and will pay tribute to you. You can succeed." She sighed, and shook her head. "You won't like the outcome, though—not any more than you enjoy the means by which you get it. You already have doubts. Shall I increase them?"

"We have doubts. We're only men. We play with things beyond our understanding, believing that what works on the small scale will also on the large. But a single raindrop tells us little about water in general, except that it's wet." He sighed. "Ask what you will. I won't reveal our words to the others. I need to know."

She had won this skirmish. "Tell me everything about fantômes."

"They are spirits," he said. "They are what a man leaves behind, when his body dies and his soul departs . . ."

* * *

Ortagion had stayed long. Now he was gone. Pierrette's head was filled with new facts and speculations. She had promised the dryade to think on it, and to tell him how it all fit with her disparate visions. There were connections—but what were they? She tried to put what she now knew into some kind of structure.

Yan Oors was not a dryade scholar. He could not have told Pierrette what she needed to know. He knew bodies with legs and arms, genitals, senses like scent and touch, vision, taste, and hearing. Bodies were ash and earth, ephemeral manifestations soon gone. But Celts thought in threes, and body was only one.

Heartbeat and breath enlivened the body. Hunger and lust drove it. Growth staved off rot, postponing its end. Those things were the fantôme—desire and craving, anger, elation, pride and hope. Urges: what everyday people called . . . life. Without its fantôme, the body died, because there was no lust to perpetuate it, no thudding heart to drive it on, and no fear to foresee what might destroy it.

Only at death did the lusty ghost depart, as morbidity set in and rot claimed its home. If the body was preserved—trapped in the ice of a mountain glacier, pickled in soured wine or packed in salt, unnaturally embalmed or mummified, the fantôme lingered, unsure if its role was ended, its purpose served. Such ghosts made folk uneasy when they walked by a tomb.

On Samonias—which Irish Ferdiad had called Samhain and Christians were coming to call All Saints, such ghosts were uneasy. The door to the Otherworld opened just a crack for a night and a day, halfway between the equinox (when night and day were equal) and the winter solstice (when night came closest to total rule).

Cremation freed fantômes immediately. Where did they go? Ortagion did not know. "Perhaps they dissipate into the life forces we sense about us," he speculated. "Perhaps they quicken the winds and make sunlight feel warm on our faces. Perhaps the roots of growing things suck them up in their sap, and newborn babes imbibe them with their mothers' milk."

There were three parts to a man or a woman, and the third, which Yan Oors had not mentioned, was . . . soul. The Greek Pythagoras, centuries before, had learned of the soul from druids of the Keltoi, whose lands bordered his peoples', and wrote his doctrine of metempsychosis, the transmigration of immortal souls, and reincarnation. The Hindus east of the Indus (the same root stock as the Gauls) espoused a similar doctrine.

Unlike fantômes, souls did not lust, because they were not bound to bodies of ash and earth. When heartbeat ceased and breath faded, souls moved on. To what Otherworld did they go? On Samhain, men claimed to have passed through to the other side, and to have returned, but none told the same tale of what they had seen. Perhaps they all lied, or perhaps none did. Ortagion did not know.

Some souls, he was sure, returned and wrapped themselves in newborn flesh—for where else sprang the memories men called déjà vu?

Souls, new or old, were not bound to flesh. In sleep, they wandered, adventuring in the Otherworld . . . and men dreamed. The souls of mystics, soothsayers, and prophetesses departed at the person's will. Was "person" thus soul, or a synthesis of soul, ghost, and flesh? Ortagion did not know.

There was much, Pierrette reflected, that he and his colleagues did not know, but that had not stopped them from experimenting. If preserving the head of an Avaticii warrior in cedar oil caused his ghost to linger, to add its strength to living warriors in the ranks atop the walls, what happened to the soul? Did it remain, tied to flesh and fantôme by an unbreakable thread?

The soul and ghost of the warrior-king Brennos had remained within his severed head for decades. Dying, he ordered his men to strike it from his body, and to bury it in Lugdunum. The voyage home took forty years. Brennos's head guided his men, and cajoled them, and only when it began at last to rot did he become anxious. Had the thread begun to fray?

Pierrette thought of another slender, tangled thread. Was she still tied to an immobile form lying damp and chilled on Sainte-Baume's mossy rocks, amid the gray beech trees? How long could she remain here before that frail husk died, and its fantôme dissipated? When the cord broke, would she die, or merely be trapped here?

She pushed her anxieties aside. She had to think, not worry.

The dryades' scheme, said Ortagion, was to take heads not only of loyal Gauls, but of others. To a degree, that was traditional: warriors kept the heads of valiant enemies (and hopefully wealthy ones). They held them for ransom—their weight in the balance pan, in yellow gold.

But the dryades had no intention of returning those heads for gold. They would only return them (or let them rot, or burn them so their souls could fly free) when the fantômes had served them—when the Massiliotes and the Romans were defeated. Those were the agonized spirits she had sensed, that Cunotar had hoped to conceal from her, delaying her until they could be removed from their niches, their silent wails muffled behind a bronze door bound, hinged and locked with iron.

"It won't end there," Pierrette had told Ortagion. "Eight hundred years from now, headless bodies will command Gaulish troops—bodies driven by ghosts whose heads are kept safe elsewhere. Those fantômes will not be honored warriors, friend or enemy; I saw headless babes in their headless mothers' arms. In that future, the living will be ruled by a headless king, himself a slave."

"Whose slave? A god's?"

"He will be more powerful than your gods. He will consume them as easily as he does hapless ghosts. I won't speak his name, lest he hear me—for he is here, in this world, and you are doing his will."

"How can that be?"

"Was it your idea to trap the fantômes of foreigners and force them to your will? Was it Ambioros's, or Sabinos's?"

"Cunotar . . . He said he heard it from Teutomalos of the Saluvii." He drew anxious breath. "But we are not the only ones. Teutomalos also spoke with dryadeae of the Vocontii, the Decivates and Segobrigii, the Camactulicii . . ."

"Of every tribe, every oppidum. I know. How many fantômes will there be, for the Eater of Gods to command?"

Ortagion's head had sagged in gloomy shame. "We are to procure a hundred. What shall I do? Already ninety are lying in jars of cedar oil."

"Free them. Break or burn them. Bury them at sea, where fish will make short work of them."

Ortagion shook his head. "Sabinos might agree, but Cunotar? It will take time. I must convince them."

"Be sure that you do."

 

 

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