There were no pillared public baths. There were no other buildings all, only neat rows of Roman tents, fenced corrals, and great stacks of wood. The fane stood in the northwest corner of the camp. The amount of open space disconcerted Pierrette. She had expected the camp to be crowded, a huddled confusion of men, tents, and stacked arms, all within close-pressing walls. But the neat rows of tents, the nearest ones hundreds of feet from where she stood, were exactly as the historians had described them. She had thought they idealized Roman precision and discipline, but it was not so.
The Romans' settlement was both like and unlike what she had expected from her readings. It was much more orderly than a merchant caravan camp. With its watchtowers, it was more permanent than the camps Julius Caesar described, set up in an afternoon, with an outer ditch, a berm heaped up from the dirt removed from it, and atop that a palisade of stakes the troops had carried on the march. Of course this was a castra stativa, a long-term siege camp, not an overnight fortification, and she suspected that troops in the camp had to be kept busy somehow.
Nearby, several uncovered poolsnatural hot springssteamed in low spots, and clothing fluttered from cords strung on poles. These were not sacred poolsthey were laundries. Women in plain, brown clothing bustled about. No one paid Pierrette any attention.
The women's speech was Gaulish. Whores, she thought. Local women who found it more rewarding to serve the Roman legionnaires than their kinsmen in the beleaguered oppidum. She was glad she had changed clothing.
No one paid heed to one more camp follower with a bundle of clothing. Ibn Saul's writings were now hidden in her parcel. Could she just walk out the gate? She eyed the two heavy timber towers set at a break in the berm and palisade. Beyond lay the freedom of the countrysideand on one of those hills, only a few miles away . . . was Entremont. She caught a glimpse of a red-clad soldier atop one tower.
She decided to watch to see if others went in and out freely. After all, this was a military camp, not an ordinary village. Thereshe could sit by that stack of firewood unnoticed. She tossed her bundle down and sat on it, then leaned back and pretended to sleep.
Something felt subtly wrong. Just as she had felt unseen eyes upon her outside Heraclea's walls, she felt them now. It was not a hateful stare, but someone was watching herand whoever it was, he was close by. She could not see anyone, but she felt ita frustrated, impatient presence, as if her own presence there was an inconvenience. As if she should have found some other place to be inconspicuous in.
But there was nowhere else she could have hidden. So where was the invisible watcher? The woodpile was a heap of assorted logs and branches, piled there when the soldiers had cleared the campsite. It had been there a while, because a clump of woodbine sent tendrils up it. The tips of the vine had buds that were fresh and green, which told her she had arrived in the very early spring. But the greenery was hardly thick enough for someone to hide within. . . .
She gasped. Not within. The watcher was the clump of vines. As she stared at it, it wavered, shimmering. "Guihen!" Leaves, tendrils, and shadows coalesced, and there, right next to her, was a familiar figure indeed. "What are you doing here?
He did not look happy to be recognized. "You can see me? What are youa witch?"
"Of course I can see you. Your spell never fooled me for longeven when I was a little girl." Didn't he recognize her? Why did he look so frightened? "Aren't you happy to see me?"
"Should I be? You steal my hiding place, then peel my deception away . . . happy? Who are you anyway?"
He truly didn't know her. Then she realized why. This was not the Guihen she knew. This was a much younger Guihen, who would not meet her . . . for centuries. With a rush, understanding came. She remembered how confused she had been, as a little girl, when the sprite said he had known her before, when she was a pretty woman, a sorceress with fire and lightning at her fingertips. . . . She had not been grown-up at all, not then. The situation had been much like this, but reversed: then Guihen had been the one who remembered, and she had not.
"Don't be afraid," she said softly, putting a hand on his skinny green-clad knee. His clothing was simpler than it would be centuries henceplain wool, not linen and silver. His shoes were ordinary leather, not shiny stuff sewn with tiny silver bells. She knew why. The weight of people's beliefs was like a physical pressure that forced reality to conform to it. As the past receded, surviving memories made ambitious boys into heroes, and heroes into godsand surviving relics like Guihen were force-fit to their new images. If Christianity became a universal creed, Guihen would become an altar boy who did only good deeds. If the fantômes triumphed . . . She shuddered at the thought. But that had not happened yet. "You may not know me now, but you will. Someday we'll be great friends. You will care for me when I'm a little girl, and you are old and wise."
Her words made no more sense to him than she should have expected, but he seemed to believe her. They were indeed a sorceress's words, or an oracle'sthey meant more than was apparent, and there was hidden truth in their seeming nonsense. So this was why the great oracles' words always confused and misled. They made sense to her, because she had seen . . . the future. With that realization, a chill raced up and down her body, and goose bumps covered her arms. The future! Now, at last, she understood.
Divination spells failed miserably, because they could only look backward on the broken Wheel of Time. Before the Wheel had been broken, at the very dawn of remembered history, the future lay open to the seers, because it lay beyond the furthest past. This was how oracles broke the rules. They did not look into the future. They were in the pasttheir own pastand what others perceived as future was not, for the oracle.
"Why are you staring like that?" asked the young Guihen uneasily.
"I just figured something out. Something that I needed to know. How oracles do it. And I am not just a masca common witch. I am a sorceress. And I'm here to save you from . . ." From what? How could she explain, without again sounding as mysterious as an oracle? " . . . from the end of the world."
She sighed. This was not easy. "I know you don't understand. I'll try to explain, laterbut now I have to get out of here. I have to get to Entremont."
He also sighed gustily. "Why didn't you say so? So must I. But if those soldiers see a chokevine walking through that gate . . ."
"Can't you just walk out?"
"They'll think I'm a spy. Only the whores can go in and out freely. Of course I am a spy, I suppose, but not for those crazy dryadeae up the hill."
"Never mind that now," she said. "Maybe we can help each other get out." Quickly, they sketched out a plan.
Boy and young woman strode confidently to the gate, as if they had every reason to be there, Pierrette clutching a stolen wooden bowl. The towers, she observed, were new, their bark freshly peeled. "Halt!" the sentry grated. "Where do you think you're going?"
"My brother has found a patch of raspberries," Pierrette said in a confidential tone. A berry patch in the vicinity of the campwhere everything had been heavily foragedwould indeed be a secret worth keeping. "Shall I pick a few for you?" She did not think that raspberries would be in season here, but would a Roman from Italia know that?
"Raspberries? I haven't tasted them since . . . but I don't recognize you."
"I'm Sequana, centurion Marcus Varro's woman." They had chosen two common names, and there were many centurions in an army the size of Calvinus's.
The sentry grinned. "Make sure you save me a bowlful of berries. I'm on duty until sunset. Be back before then." He waved them through the gate.
They headed eastward on the well-beaten, rutted track that led toward the besieged oppidum. "The Romans don't have Entremont locked up tight," Guihen said. "They would not allow a wagonload of grain to get past them, but we can evade them easily enough, if you can climb a bit. . . ." His eyes brushed her long skirt. She lifted the hem, revealing her calf-length trousers. "I'll manage," she said, grinning.
Like all the hills in that part of Provence, the heights upon which Entremont stood were cliffs on the south, and sloped gradually to the north. The cliff made an abrupt bend to the north at its westward end, diminishing in height as it went. In all, the oppidum was shaped like an east-pointing arrowhead, one edge the high south cliffs, the other a series of small escarpments bounding the north, and the base of the triangle the western cliff. The highest point was at the southwest, a roughly square enclosure, the old citadel. The west and most of the north were protected by thick stone walls with square towers. The half of the arrow nearest the east "point" was the low town, recent buildings housing mostly artisans, refugees, and foreign traders.
Much of the surrounding countryside was forest or abandoned fields gone to scrub. The Roman observation posts, Guihen explained, were concentrated in three groups opposite the town gatesthe commercial east gate into the low town, the main portal on the west, and posterns or sally ports in the north wall and at the top of a steep path down the south cliff. That trail from the south portal, said Guihen, was sheltered by stretches of wall that protected a spring gushing near the cliff base, the town's only source of water besides cisterns for rainwater. "There the Romans stay well back, beyond the reach of arrows from the cliff top."
He led her through a dense copse where they had to crawl on all fours. Just downhill, Pierrette heard men's voices and the stamping of tethered horses. "Romans," Guihen whispered.
They reached a stone wall hardly high enough to keep sheep from straying. Crawling behind it, they ascended the rubble slope to the cliff. Everything was thickly overgrown, the rocks and wall covered with vines, saplings, and lichen. No one had used this route in some timeperhaps since the siege began. So soon after the winter rains, she supposed all the cisterns were full.
When they reached steps cut in the cliff, they halted. Below were the Romans. There were no signs of activity. Lazy smoke rose where a dozen men sprawled, helmets off. Some slept, and others played a game with dice.
"Why aren't they fightingor at least ready to?" Pierrette whispered
"It's a siege, not a battle. When food runs low in the city, and the cisterns run dry, maybe there'll be a fight. Why should the Romans waste men against these cliffs, or the walls and towers above, when hunger will do their work for them?"
"You don't like them, do you?"
"Romans? Why would I? They're invaders, friends of the Greeks. When they conquer a place, they never let go of it. Everywhere, they've driven us Ligures into the hills, and they water their oxen at our sacred pools. Look what they did to the Boii when they overran the valley of the Padus.
"The Boii are CeltsGauls like the Salluvii and the others up there in the town. Why do you care?"
"Celts have been around for centuries. We get along. But the Romans . . ."
"Don't you care how they beat the Romans then? Does victory justify any means at all?"
"What you mean?" The young Ligure would not meet her eyes.
"I think you know."
He shrugged. "Some kind of magic. Gaulish magic. I don't know much about it."
"I do. If they succeed, nothing will ever be the same."
"The end of the world? That's what you said before."
"I meant it toothe end of gods and goddesses, sacred pools and sunny skies, and of people like you, too."
"Like me? Ligures, you mean?"
"Is that all you are? Just another backwoods boy? Shall I tell you what you will becomeunless the Gauls of Entremont succeed, of course."
He was hooked. She gestured for him to sit beside her. They would have to wait until dark anyway, to scale the stairway to the gate above, or risk being shot at by Romans and Gauls alike.
"Several centuries from now," Pierrette said portentously, "the name `Guihen' will be known by everyone in Provence. . . ."