Multivolume works pose problems for author and reader alike. I have tried to make The Veil of Years an independent tale, entertaining by itself, if you have not read The Sacred Pool or if you have already read the third volume, The Isle Beyond Time. If you expect books to do more than entertainif you want to follow the development of the theological, philosophical, and anthropological arguments as wellthen I suppose you'll have to read them in chronological order. A discussion of the nature of mutating myths, and an extensive bibliography have already been printed in a predecessor volume, The Sacred Pool. I won't duplicate that here, only summarize briefly.
The theodicy question: in a world created by a good God, whence comes evil? Manichaean and Gnostic dualities violate the Rule of Elegance, Occam's Razor; in The Sacred Pool, the demon was created by men with free will, by their lumping together frustrations, annoyances, pains, and petty wrongdoingsby their having defined it. It was destroyed when every person present at the "exorcism" consumed a portion of it, thus putting evil in its proper perspective, a purely human attribute.
Great religions and philosophies define great evils, and individuals small ones. When people categorize ever-smaller wrongs and sufferings as evil, they perceive a world that is less and less good. A political analogy is apropos: the more we legislate the details of human behavior, the more of us are, by definition, criminals, and the higher the "crime rate" rises. The "Black Time" represents the end product of such tendencies. We might instead try to appreciate the pagans (or Christians) among us for the clarity and focus they give to our own worship, to appreciate our pains for the vital information they supply: warnings, and affirmation that we still endure.
Caius Sextius Calvinus saw nothing wrong with killing enemies or enslaving the vanquished. Was he an evil man? By our rapidly evolving modern standardsI immediately think of the feeding frenzy over Thomas Jefferson's alleged slave mistress, based on the flimsiest quasi-evidencehe was. Evil is clearly socially as well as religiously defined.
Centaurs and kentors, Huns, hunnos, and hundreds: the Greeks, who like most ancient Indo-European folk once rode to war in chariots, probably derived their centaurs from their first glimpses of Scythian horsemen. A "hunno" was the Germanic leader of a hundred families, a centurion the leader of a hundred Roman troopers.
The story of Bellagos and Aurinia is cut from whole cloth, representing all those legendary figures who, at tale's end, depart for some mysterious place that lies beyond mortal ken. Master Jock is a legendary Provençal figure, whose tale is masterfully told by Claude Clement in his wonderful collection Contes Traditionelles de Provence. Perhaps indeed he was once Lugh, god of artisans (and many other things), kept alive by giving him a pseudo-Christian "cover story."
My fantômes, one-third of the Gaulish Trinity of body, ghost, and soul, owe much to Fernand Benoit (Entremont, 1962). Benoit's speculations have been superseded in recent decades, replaced only by admissions of ignorance, but both classical sources and archaeology demonstrate the importance of severed heads to the Gauls. Bran, the Celtic raven-god, whose severed head remained alive for forty years, to advise his traveling companions, gives strong support to the concept of head as the seat of consciousness and identity. The head-sized niches in the pillars of Gaulish temples are literally graven in stone. Superseded or not, Benoit's views survive, if only as one further example of the "mutating myths" that underlie The Veil Of Years.
Most Roman names I've used are ones with descendants in modern FrenchClaudia/Claudius, and Marius, which survives unchanged. Poul Anderson, whose understanding of things historical far surpasses my own, and who caught numerous errors in The Sacred Pool, grumbled about "Pierrette," which is a thoroughly modern diminutive of "Pierre." I considered changing it, but found that the symbolism of Petra/Peter/Pierrette, all "stones," was too deeply interwoven to be easily removed. Bear with me and imagine that, like many other names, there was a late Latin or other Indo-European word for "a little stone," and that it might have sounded a little bit like "Pierrette."
Some Gaulish names, like Segomaros, are known from surviving inscriptions. Others are composites of proto-Indo-European or Gaulish roots, like "borro," rapids (thus tidal bore), or "danu," river, whence Danube, Drina, Dnieper, Don, and Rhodanus (now Rhone). The names of most Gallic chiefs and gods that have come down to us are eponymous, like Teutatis, "god of the tribe" (teuta), Teutomalos, "Hammer of the tribe," Nemetona, "of the nemeton, the sacred grove."
Perhaps the most overused eponym of all is Cernunnos, which means simply "the horned one." It has obtained the stature of a true name in modern literature, fiction and nonfiction alike, but in actuality there is only one dedicatory inscription where the letters KERNVNNOS are actually written down. Sometimes the mutated myth is much more successful than the cultural "gene" from which it sprang.
Belisama's cave, on the north slope of the Sainte Baume escarpment, is a well-maintained shrine. In Pierrette's time, before Mary Magdalen's bones had been exhumed from their crypt in the valley below and placed in a glass case in the cave, and before some king who did not wish to scramble over rocks ordered the strenuous pilgrims' trail graded and smoothed, it was already a famous destination. The liturgy quoted in The Veil Of Years is my translation of the French one in use at Sainte Baume today. The "walking liturgy" that I describe derives in equal parts from the Stations of the Cross and from Gestalt therapy, similar means to different ends. I am grateful to Karen Armstrong (Armstrong, 1996) for articulating not only what I felt walking that pilgrims' path, but the importance of place and physical participation in religious experience in general.
The legions at Aquae Sextiae Salluviorum's table of organization, march order, and camps, are directly from Polybius, with clarification and details from Theodore A. Dodge (Hannibal, 1995). The legions of 124 B.C. were roughly in the middle of a transition period between the Republican citizens' levies, organized around the maniple, and the paid or "professional" armies of Marius and the Caesars, with the cohort as the primary tactical unit. I have shown Caius Sextius Calvinus anticipating the Marian reorganization to some degree, assuming that the need for the tactical cohort anticipated its full implementation.
As for the Gauls, I suspect that literary images of disorganized masses of berserkers with long swords are holdovers from a much earlier dayfrom the Hallstatt Iron Age incursions of Gauls into the Padus (Po) River Valley and elsewhere. By 124 B.C., Gauls had been successfully fighting Romans and Greeks for centuries, and thus a high level of organization must be assumed. Gauls fought alongside Hannibal, and as mercenaries in other Carthaginian and Greek armies, and were surely quite comfortable with ordinary phalanx formations. I have chosen to show Gallic organization as a superposition of Carthaginian and Greek structure upon the Celtic/Germanic "hunno" as described by Delbruck (1990).
The exigencies of plotting a novel have given rise to several unlikelihoods, like Calvinus's arrival at the scene of battle without at least two allied legions, and (perhaps due to that manpower constraint) his failure to construct walls of circumvallation or other siegeworks around Entremont. My rationale is simple: the problem of manpower for the legions was already acute, a major source of political unrest in Rome, and Marius's solution, a paid, professional army, was still two decades away.
The known facts about the two-year conflict with the Celto-Ligurians are sparse: Fulvius Flaccus was granted a triumph in Rome in 125 B.C. after fighting the Salyens; Diodorus Siculus describes Kraton as a Roman partisan who suffered at the hands of his fellow citizens who had revolted, presumably against Rome; Calvinus was granted a triumph in Rome following his victory in 124 B.C.; there is archaeological evidence of two sieges at of Entremont. Taken together, these sources imply that Flaccus (likely with Latin or Italian allies, not Massilian) accepted the Salyens' surrender in 125 B.C., after battles in the field but perhaps without having successfully stormed the citadel itself. Thus Calvinus's expedition likely began as a police action to reimpose terms, and escalated to the destruction of the oppidum itself, perhaps at the instigation of the Massilians, for whom its very existence was a continuing threat.
Having two alternate worlds to work in, I chose to have the Roman conquerors use both likely routes to Entremontvia the Rhone and via the Argens. W. H. Hall (Hall, 1898), in our history, makes a good case for the latter. Needless to say, the final history is ours. The great road across Mediterranean France is the Via Domitia, not Tiberia, because Tiberius Gracchus did indeed die in 129 B.C. Flaccus triumphed in 125, Calvinus in 124. And Polybius fell from his horse that day, or soon thereafter.