Unable even to consider sleeping, Pierrette climbed the ladder to the tower roof. South, the wall stretched past a gate, then turned west, petering out at the steep cliffs. North, it curved westerly past the main gate and ended in a similar way, at the other end of the unscalable cliff. Near the northwest end was a sally port that opened onto a trail invisible from below. "A town can't be defended from the inside against sappers digging beneath its walls without," Enakles had told her. "There have to be ways for warriors to get out. There are two such gates. One is on the south, where it can be seen by any Massaliote spy. The other is concealed within a cobbler's wooden shackthere. Only the king and his sons know of it." She fixed the location of that secret exit in her mind.
Peering across the town from above, she observed white-kilted Greeks on the way to the Herakleon for devotions before the start of the workday, though it was not yet dawn, and the moon was a thin crescent far in the west. She had no trouble seeing, almost as if it were already day. She saw people clustering in the ahoras, the square. The dryades were speaking with a large group of armed men. Now they were coming her way. She scrambled down the ladder. Suddenly, she wished she had left by the hidden gate, when Enakles had showed it to her, and not waited to try to reason with them one last time.
"Come down, seeress," shouted Cunotar, his voice harsh as gravel. "Today we shall have an oracle who will tell us the true fate of our great walls."
True fate? Then the dryadeae had chosen not to believe Ortagionor her. What did they intend? Two soldiers held a man whose arms were bound behind him. Black hair marked him as a foreigner. He was clothed in a single rag wrapped around his midsection. Diodorus Siculus had written of Gallic divination. She knew what the man's fate would be, and her blood ran cold. She was ashamed that her first reaction was relief: she was not to be the victim herself.
There was no time to change out of her boy's clothing. She wrapped a skirt over her bracae and shook out her hair. A shawl and the drape of her veil covered her tunic. It would have to do. . . .
"I have no need to take lives to see true futures," she called down to the dryades. "You have no need of my presence." Was that blood spotting the hem of Cunotar's robe? How many men had died while she waited, looking out over the countryside? How many empty niches were left in the pillars and lintels of the nemeton?
"Come," said Cunotar, more softly. "Do you wish to be dragged forth?" What choice did she have? Could she break free, slip away in the crowd, and make for the secret gate?
Pulling her veil across her facegrateful, now, for the concealment it offeredshe descended the stairs. Two husky warriors took position beside her. The crowd was not all men. Mothers had brought their little children to witness the rite that would take place. Horribly, they all smiled, even laughed nervously, in an uneasy, almost festive mood.
It was the longest walk of her life. And it was not the first time she had walked it. This is the vision that has terrified me for years. This is the Ugium of my nightmare. As in the dream, she sensed the excitement of the crowd, the faces a blur, the cobbled street . . .
She felt the brooding, bitter fantômes atop the city walls, the aching misery of those who were not Gauls, not of the city. Threads of emotion like cobwebs brushed the surface of her mind: a Greek merchant betrayed by Ambioros, murdered with his own sword. He yearned for a far land of gray, barren hills dotted with sheep, where lemon trees grew in the thick soil of watered valleys. He pined for his father, whose bones lay in a hillside crypt, for his mother asleep beside him. He yearned. His soul yearned for release, for the funeral pyre that would free it to fly away on smoke-laden winds. He yearned for true death.
She sensed his discontent at a body already consumed with rot, that he wanted to shake free of, but could not. Wander as he might, he was always drawn up short as by an invisible tether, long before he was near home.
Pierrette felt other bound souls. A Briton yearned for his family's burial plot near the wall of his village, in the shadow of a great circle of standing stones. An Etrurian wine merchant, stealthily slain, mourned the lost, vast graveyard, like a city of houses, all underground. There lay parents and grandparents, amid painted scenes of everyday life. There would children and grandchildren come to light a fire on the funerary hearth, to feast among the beloved dead. But he was not with them. He was here in Gaul, and his head lay unsmiling in pungent oil, behind the bronze-and-iron door at the back of the nemeton, now ajar.
Pierrette felt all their tales of woe, their pleading to be freedand their despairing willingness to obey the dryades' demands, all for the promise of freedom in some indefinite future time. She wanted to scream at them: "No! It's a trap. You'll never be freed. If you do evil, the Eater of Gods will consume you, and all your yearnings and pain will be no more than salt sprinkled on his meat."
But they would not hear her. And now she had arrived at the sanctum. Torches flared in bronze sconces by the door, though it was no longer night. Cunotar was speaking to the assemblage. "Behold the messenger," he cried, holding his sword over the unfortunate foreigner's head. "Behold the sacrifice."
"Namnites hear us!" shouted Ambioros. "Taranis send lightning to burn the Massiliotes."
"Deafen them with your voice," Sabinos shouted. "Wash away their blood with holy rain."
"Vindonnos, harden us like the mortar that holds stone to stone," added Ortagionweakly, thought Pierrette, as if he were only going through the ritual motions, without conviction.
A woman stepped forward, tossing aside veil and mantle, revealing herself naked. "Andrasta quicken us," she demanded, clutching her belly. "Give us strong sons to defend us, to take the places of those who will soon die."
Anarchy! Did every person in the crowd appeal to a different god? Then what was she but the priestess of one very minor goddess indeedand without the slightest power or influence. Was that what the dryades intended to show her?
Cunotar motioned to a soldier. Two warriors grasped the prisoner's arms. One cut his bonds. The crowd grew silent as Ambioros raised his hands. "Now we shall pierce the veil of years, and know our fateand our enemies'."
No! That was all wrong. Parting the veil of years did not work like that. Once time had been a wheel, and the future could be reached by seeingor voyaging back throughthe remote past, but the disastrous spell that had created the Black Time at beginning and end alike had broken the wheel. Mondradd in Mon only looked back, not into the future.
The victim was as white as if already drained of blood. His eyes were wide and glassy. Cunotar grasped the short sword with both hands . . . and plunged it into the victim's belly. He tugged upward, widening the cut, then stepped back as pink, glistening entrails spilled in a slow, viscous cascade. Only then did the man scream.
The soldiers released his arms, and he crumpled to the cobbles, his arms scrabbling against them, his body humping. "He's not moving enough," Sabinos muttered anxiously. "How can we read the days to come from his thrashing?"
"Shut up!" Ortagion hissed out of the corner of his mouth. "Let Cunotar work."
The hooded dryade turned the victim over with a foot. Pierrette saw him reach inside his robe, then make motions over the spilled entrails. . . . The man began to thrash and moan. He burbled, unable to draw proper breath to scream. His fingers clawed at his midsection, his heels drummed the cobbles, and his head jerked madly from side to side.
Cunotar hovered over him, as if his thrashings were indeed signs from the godsand not the result of whatever corrosive powder he had sprinkled on the man's innards. The thrashing weakened. The man's hands alone twitched.
"It's too soon," Sabinos whispered. "He mustn't die yet. . . ." But with a last bubbling sigh, the victim stiffened, and was entirely still.
"Raise him," Cunotar grated. "Hold his hair." One soldier lifted the lifeless head from the ground, and two others lifted his torso by the arms. The sword arced downward with all Cunotar's strength.
Pierrette swallowed bitter bile, and fought neither to vomit nor weep. Cunotar held the head up. "One more guardian for our walls!" he cried. "Now there are . . . ninety-nine."
The crowd roared, a cacophony that beat on Pierrette's eardrums. Ninety-nine. One less than the hundred Teutomalos had demanded.
"Come," said Ortagion. He guided her into the nemeton. "Cunotar will be a while, recounting what the gods have told him."
"What he wants people to think they said!" she spat. "Why are you going along with this farce? That was no proper spell, no proper augury."
Ortagion looked away, suddenly old and defeated. "There are now ninety-nine fantômes. Cunotar offered me the chance to serve my city as the hundredth."
"Petra! Petra Veleda!" Enakles shouldered his way to the door, where two soldiers stopped him. "Remember what I told you." What did that mean? What did it matter? She now knew who the hundredth fantôme would be. Not Ortagion. Her.
The inner door was open, and Ortagion led her through it. The odor of cedar oil was almost overwhelming. Pierrette's eyes burned. Sabinos brought the severed head inside.
The inner room was not a sanctum, it was a butcher's shop, a warehouse for heads. Shelves lined the rear wall. False painted eyes stared down from them. Sewn lips drew down in scowls or up in grimaces. The floor was a litter of open pots, liquid-filled. In each was a dark, rounded shape. Sabinos thumped the fresh head on a stained, scarred table. He picked up a large bronze needle threaded with sinew.
He nudged the room's only oil lamp close to the dead face . . . and Pierrette could sense the spirit behind that visage. For a moment she was relieved, because she sensed no pain. The trapped soul was confused, as if awakened abruptly in a strange place.
"Flee!" she commanded silently. "Flee before you're trapped behind sewn-shut eyelids."
"Flee? How?" The thoughts were jumbled, confused . . . and then were overwhelmed by others. Ninety-eight others, all at oncebitter, jealous thoughts.
"Stay! You're no better than us."
"You're ninety-nine. One more, and we're complete. One more . . ."
"And we'll complete our task . . ."
"Then we'll be free."
Pierrette clapped her hands over her ears . . . but the voices were already in her head. Her head. The trapped souls knew. She felt their eagerness, their craving. "One last soul! Yours!"
"Complete us."
"Help us be free."
"Home! Then we can go home!"
"You'll never go home. They'll keep you for a thousand years." The voices ignored her, drumming in her head, buffeting her. The sharp-scented, heady air was unbreathable. She was dizzy. She felt her knees sag. Ortagion held her up. "You can't do this!" she said. "You'll lose everything. Help me. Help me free them."
His face was a mask of despair. Had he heard them too? "How?" he whispered.
"Take me over to the table."
"What will you do?"
"Just do itor you're more doomed than these poor trapped souls. Where's that doorthe one I saw from outside?"
"Straight ahead, then right."
"Can we get out that way?"
"It's only barred on the inside. But why?"
"Just be ready. You'll know when."
Slowly, hopefully unnoticed by Sabinos, they edged toward the table. Sabinos had sewed both eyelids shut, and was rethreading the needle. He looked up, surprised to see them so close. "What are you . . ."
Pierrette swept her hand across the table. The flame flickered wildly as the lamp flew off the edge. She kicked over a jar on the floor. Cedar oil splashed, and a head rolled soddenly into the spreading flames. With a great thump the air itself seemed to ignite. She heard Sabinos screaming. His garment and hair were on fire. Pierrette squeezed her eyes shut. A hot wind buffeted her. "The door! Can you find the door?"
Ortagion tugged on her arm. She risked a peek. Flames filled most of the room. They were rushing toward the open portal, not toward them. Sabinos staggered blindly through, still screaming, knocking aside warriors who could not brave the heat to enter. She turned. Ortagion was struggling with the door. It would not open. She grabbed and heaved next to him. The pressure of the flames inside held it. Then it moved . . . and the pent flames suddenly leaned their way, rushing toward the new escape route. Ortagion pulled her outside. They sprawled on the cobbles. Flames gouted over their heads.
Inside, one crackling roar followed another as pots of oil ignited, fed with fresh air. The air itself burned. Smoke billowed from the roof tiles overhead. Sabinos no longer screamed, but from the street around the corner, she heard Cunotar shouting. "Save them! Save the heads!"
"It's too hot!"
"No one could live in there. They're already burning."
"Try the back way. Quickly."
"Come on!" Pierrette pulled Ortagion now.
"Where? They'll find us, wherever we . . ."
"I know a way out. There's a cobbler's shack west of the gate, along the wall. Can you find it?"
"Meclos's place. But he's dead, and it's boarded up. . . ."
"Get us there, quickly."
The streets were empty. Everyone had gone to the nemeton for the spectacle. She glanced back the way they had come, and saw a column of black, spark-laden smoke.
"Here," Ortagion said. "What now?"
"Get us inside."
The dryade launched a flat-footed kick at the boarded doorway. Several planks fell. He did it again. "Now what?"
"There's a hidden sally port somewhere . . ."
"That's the city wall." He pointed to the stone rear surfaceand then to a tiny door, heavily reinforced with iron, only waist high. "And there's the exit." He struggled with the heavy bars holding it shut. Light streamed inside. Beyond, Pierrette could see only large coursed stones. Was this a mistake? That looked like the city wall out there. Were they still trapped? She wriggled outside. The stones were a staircase. A natural stone rampart concealed the gate from below. A paved path, two men wide, led down the side of the scarp. She could see the rusty red of a salin, a salt-basin, down there. A long way down.
"Good-bye," Ortagion said.
"You're going back?"
"No one saw me. I'll say I saw you burning in the nemeton. You'll have time to get away. . . . But where will you go?"
She pointed beyond the salin, where the land was as flat as the undisturbed water. "The Plain of Stones," she said. "I think someone's waiting for me there."
The way Ortagion peered at her, she knew he was seeing the mor'h-ganna Petra now, and that her reply had come from no reasoned source.
She felt eyes upon her as she emerged from the narrow path, at the brushy edge of the salin. The unknown watcher's gaze was cold, malevolent. Who? Ortagion had hurried away. She looked back up the rocky slope to the top of Heraclea's wall. Then she knew; all the fantômes had not been destroyed. The ninety-ninethe foreign ghostshad fled homeward on the wings of smoke, and were free, but Heraclea's own honored dead, in niches around the nemeton's portal, had not burned.
She shuddered and quickened her pace. Had the ghostly sentry told Cunotar? Then Ortagion was surely doomed. But she could do nothing about that, except to make his death count, by winning free herself.