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Chapter 33 - Coming Home

When she topped the last ridge, she could see the green-clad island offshore, the red scarps of the Eagle's Beak and, westward, even the white stones that people said were the remains of a dragon. That last sight struck her like a physical blow: is that what they are? Just stones? Just the honeycombed remains of limestone cliffs, eroded by wind and rain? She remembered the shadow of great wings over the embattled walls of Entremont: that had been such a brief encounter, over in moments. No one else had even looked up. Had there been a dragon? If so, what purpose had been served, except to make her feel as she did now: awash in a sea of doubt, unsure what had really happened, and what part she had played in it.

But atop the furthest crest of the red rocks was a dark, regular shape: Anselm's keep, solid stone, and quite real. And . . .

"Cluck."

She spun around. "Guihen!"

"Hello, little one. Welcome back. It has been a long day indeed." She looked long and hard at him. Had his face always been lined with the fine wrinkles of age and exposure? Had his violet eyes always been so deep, so wise and . . . so old?

"Oh, Guihen! Did all really happen? And were you really young then?"

"Since we last said good-bye and you went inside the fane, I have watched the Roman Empire grow, and then die. When the Christian priests came, and pointed accusing fingers at every holy well, every ancient tree driven with a thousand nails, sacred to this god or that, I watched the magic in the world fade away, because they deemed it evil, and theirs was the power to decide. I fled to the Camargue, the vast reed sea at the mouth of river Rhodanus, because I was no longer a Ligure boy, but a magical being, and only there could I survive.

"But when it was time—as you told me it would be—I left my safe haven, and I found you where you said you would be. You were a little girl then, lost and alone. I watched over you, while you grew, and your belief sustained me in a world grown hostile to my kind.

"When you wanted to go to the keep atop the red rocks, I barred your way, until you were old enough to withstand what Anselm might teach you. I knew this, because you had told me, long ago, when first you emerged from the fane. I am myself, and I remember all those long, empty years before you were born. Were they real? Am I?"

He shrugged. "Come. Let's go home. Everyone is wondering where you have been lately. A few things may be different, not exactly as you remember them, but people don't change much. They're always curious."

"What shall I tell them?"

"If you tell them the truth, they won't believe it, and will probably create a myth of their own, more fantastic than truth. If you give them a lie . . ."

"I'll not explain, then. I'll just smile, and say that the winds off the Plain of Stones are cool even on hot days, and Rhodanus is broad and wide, and that the new hostelry Cerdos is building for the monks of Saint Cassien will be bigger than the old one and surely more comfortable. And all those things are true."

* * *

Day or night, the perpetual noonday sun shone in the windows of Anselm's keep, but in the library Pierrette only allowed a narrow shaft of golden Provençal light past the drapes, because she had had enough of fading ink, even if the cause was only excess sunlight.

She unfurled a scroll of Diodorus Siculus on the smooth-worn table, and settled onto the same bench her small buttocks had polished when she was a child. She no longer felt like a child. She had experienced passion—her own, and Alkides's, and Calvinus's—though she was still virgin (enough, that is, to satisfy the requirements of sorcery).

Now as she unrolled the scroll, she noted that the ink at the end was no less dark than at the beginning. She skimmed familiar passages near the end, and much to her relief found nothing changed. Other books were similarly untouched: Augustine had written The City Of God when he had written it in her original history, and Caesar's De Bello Gallico occupied the exact moment as before. And yes, Marius had ordered his fossa, his canal, dug in 104 B.C., and had bested the Teutons in 102 B.C.

Only when she turned back another two decades did she find changes: Calvinus had stormed Entremont in 124, not 127. He had then proceeded to take Heraclea and a dozen other oppida, all the way to the Rhodanus, thus permanently breaking the power of the Salyen League. The general who succeeded him, hearing that Teutomalos had been given safe haven, used that pretext to wage war, and to annex many rich lands for Roma. She set the scroll aside.

With increasing trepidation, she arose, and approached the shelf where forty volumes of Polybius—bound volumes, with wood-and-leather covers, not scrolls—resided. And there they were, all forty, including the now-completed index. She opened that one with trembling fingers. There were, she soon verified, just forty volumes, not forty-one. So. Polybius had lived to complete the index, but had not written another book. Or had he? Was there anywhere a true account of the siege of Entremont? Could there be a secret volume that went beyond the bare outlines, the Capitoline lists of consular victories and triumphs? She put the index back on its shelf.

What was this? The small, plain scroll had been misplaced. It did not belong on Polybius's shelf. It was unlabeled, so she spread it on the table to ascertain what it was, and thus where it belonged. . . .

"This is the forty-first book by Polybius . . ." the inscription read—the small, Greek-style letters were written in a cramped, shaky hand, one that she recognized immediately. The next line confirmed the scribe's identity: " . . . written in my own hand, and of which no single copy has been made.

"My dear Pierrette," began the next sentence, "I saved this space at the beginning of this volume for the words I would write last, when all else had been done. If you are reading this, then my most clever enterprise has succeeded. That, of course, was to insure that this scroll would reach you down all the intervening centuries.

"I wrote this volume, an account of the campaign for what is now the Province of Gallia Transalpina, over seven years, and only recently completed it. I am now entrusting it to an elderly sage who fancies himself a bit of a sorcerer. He is also a functionary here in the Capitoline library in Roma. Of course I don't believe in magic, or the literal intervention of Fortuna, but my friend C. Flaminius does, and as soon as I finish these last lines, he will take this scroll and hide it, and will utter a spell that will conceal it until the year A.D. 10, as you told me years are reckoned in your age.

"If you are reading this in your mentor's keep on the red rocks overlooking Citharista, then I was wrong to disbelieve, or else my disbelief did not matter. (By the way, I have visited the site where Citharista will be built someday, and have seen those red rocks, just as you described them. There is, of course, no keep on top of the outermost, and only a rude Gaulish fishing village on the shore, but when I squinted my eyes, I could almost see the outline of a wall atop the cliff, and the eerie silhouettes of monstrous, spidery machines, like ballistae grown huge, hovering over the lovely little harbor. But that was surely my imagination, spurred by the stories you told me.)

"The scroll is addressed to Anselm, and if the finder is honest, it will be delivered a year or two after your mentor arrives to build his keep, in a shipment of works he ordered copied in Roma. There, in your glorious home, in the light of never-ending noonday, it will remain until you find it, for a further spell (or so Flaminius tells me, and I dare not disagree) will render anyone who touches it incurious, and it will remain unread until it reaches your own hand, your adult hand that (as you confided in me, so sweetly blushing the while) has known the not-very-mysterious secrets of a man's passion. I can see you blushing now, and I have no desire to embarrass you, so I will finish quickly. Flaminius has already begun his mumbo jumbo, and is looking anxiously at me.

"Use this as you will, and reveal it or not. I will be long gone and no longer susceptible to the pride of accomplishment. I have no idea if its introduction to the world centuries after my demise would cause echoes and perturbations down the dark corridors of future time, or whether like a single raindrop in the stormy sea, its ripples would be lost in the waves and spume, and have no lasting effect. Perhaps you'll know the answer to that, when you have compared the history you knew to that which you find, at your faraway destination.

"Now I must go, and leave this scribbling. I have not ridden a horse since last I spoke with you—just in case your foreknowledge was still valid in this different world, and I might thus thwart Fortuna's plan. But today is my eighty-second birthday, and I have hired a horse to carry me home. I have missed riding, and if I have lost the skill, and my docile mare throws me off—well, then the goddess I don't believe in will have the last say."

* * *

There ended Polybius's hurried scrawl, and below it, after a short interval, began the body of the document, in the same hand, but neater, as if unrushed and deliberate:

* * *

My other books were written for the edification of Greeks, to further their understanding of the greatest political system of all, the Romans and their Constitution, and to elucidate the events that led to that fruition. This one is written only for one person's eyes, and if the world ever sees it . . .

* * *

Pierrette stopped reading, because her eyes had filled with tears, and she did not want to smudge the ancient ink, unfaded after all the centuries it had remained in the darkness of the tightly rolled scroll. Perhaps she would allow Anselm . . . or even Father Otho . . . to read it to her. Yes. Father Otho. He would neither get overexcited, nor would he cry.

* * ** * *

There were other tasks to be done in Anselm's library. For the better part of a week, Pierrette turned the pages of uncounted books, and unrolled as many scrolls, looking for a familiar name: Caius Sextius Calvinus, consul in 124 B.C., founder of the Roman colony called Aquae Sextiae Salluviorum.

She had read of the election of Flaccus and Gaius Gracchus as tribunes in 122 B.C. At that time, the Gauls had not yet entirely been defeated—the final operations, against the Arvernii and the Allobroges (into whose arms the defeated Teutomalos had fled) were left to Cnaeus Domitius Ahenobarbus, in 121. He was the man who stepped into the shoes of Tiberius Gracchus, untimely murdered in this new history, that was only subtly changed from the one Pierrette knew, and in this age the great road was named for him: Via Domitia.

Because the Gaulish lands were not yet available to be given to the Roman poor, the new consuls proposed a compromise: Roman citizenship, with all its rights and protections under law, was to be given all Latin allies, and the rest of Italia would gain the old Latin Right, which also conferred certain protections of Roman law. That was in exchange for their relinquishing much of the land they had held since the Punic wars.

But it was too little, too late. In 121 both Flaccus and Gaius Gracchus were murdered by their political enemies, and almost three thousand of their supporters were tried in the courts, convicted, and executed. Now Pierrette sought among once-familiar pages for a familiar name, but she did not find it. For her, the fate of one particular supporter of the reformers, Caius Sextius Calvinus, remained unknown.

 

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