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Chapter 2 - Ancient Ghosts

Had all Provence enjoyed the wondrous spell that lit the keep of Anselm the sorcerer—where the sun shone night and day—its mood might have been equally cheery. But night came, and not all the torches, candles, and wicks burning in oil could push darkness away, and with darkness came footsteps in the night, and the cries of souls in torment. Had Provence been a cold northern land of dank forests and gray skies, its people might have been enured to the terrors that stalked their countryside. But it was not.

Outside Tolonia, at the foot of the mountain called Sainte Victoire, Holy Victory, the shepherd Sinatos found an ewe staked on her back, her entrails spread in patterns like characters from some ancient alphabet.

A monk tending Saint Giles's shrine saw a deer walk on its hind legs around the saint's sarcophagus. The stag's footprints, graven in the stone flags as if pressed into soft mud, gave credence to his unlikely tale.

Near Saint-Mitre, an olive tree uprooted itself and marched across the road. It settled amid grapevines, which bore olives that year, while the tree bore grapes.

The rattle of chain mail and scabbards, the cries and clashes of battle, were heard in the reedy forests along the Druentia, but no reeds were trampled nor bodies left behind. Downstream, an eroding bank released the bones of an ancient Celt, clad in the rust of chain mail. He had no head for the priest to murmur over, only an empty helm of pitted iron.

Bridges shook with marching feet, but no soldiers were seen. Groans of dying men issued from beneath them, yet no corpses remained when the priests came, unsure if unction or exorcism were required.

Masses were well attended, not because people were pious, but because they were afraid, and were unaccustomed to such fears. Some might say little separated fear and piety.

* * *

Guihen the Orphan suffered greatly because of those fears. He was an odd little fellow. He might have been considered deformed, the twisted product of inbreeding among the reclusive folk of the oldest blood. He might, equally, have been a wood sprite, not human at all. His ears were large. His eyes shone violet in the darkness.

Claudia, who made the chewiest boules of honey-colored bread, left a loaf for him every night, but tonight there was no bread; instead, garlic, teasel, and nightshade hung from the peg on her door, and Guihen sickened even before he saw it. He had only enough strength left to crawl away.

Banes also hung from other doors. Herbs deadly to his kind were strewn on windowsills and thresholds. He found no wine or sausage, no sweet olives, not even a cup of milk. He did no good deeds that night, and had no heart for pranks. The once-friendly town had become a trap.

He made one last desperate stop, at a house with no bane. It was a friend's house, a friend who would never turn against him, but no one was home. He could not write, but he left a sign. He would wait in the hills for a day.

There were guards at the town gate—shadowy men in creaking leather and ancient armor. But they had no heads, and they did not watch the roads leading into Citharista, but looked inward as if to keep the townsmen—or vagrants like himself—within. Could anyone but he see them?

The town's walls were crumbled. It was not hard to scramble over them, but even then he was not safe. A stag blocked his path. Its antlers gleamed in the rising moon's yellow light as if covered with gold foil. Its eyes glowed red, and its steamy breath was thick as smoke. Guihen edged off the trail into the tangles. Brush and bushes remained his friends, and though he heard crackling pursuit, he outdistanced it, slipping through dense undergrowth as if it were mist.

He sank into the shadows of a limestone cleft. Slowly his breathing returned to normal. "That is it, then. I can't return to the town." His only listener was the small white hen he carried under one arm, his pet and his friend—his familiar, folk of a later age might say. People said the hen was the source of his magic. Indeed, when he stroked its feathers right then, he seemed to disappear, leaving not even a shadow.

* * *

Pierrette surveyed her books. Cato was too serious, Ovid too frivolous, but there was a history—Diodorus Siculus, from whose name the knight Diodoré's was derived. Its ancient, familiar words would soon lull her to sleep.

She thumbed through the first half until she came to a single word: Heraclea. She shuddered. Heraclea was the Greek name of the town known today as . . . Ugium. A Celtic settlement, Greeks had made it a center of the salt trade. Romans had sacked it. Now Ugium was of no importance except to local farmers, but the taint of unknown and ancient evil lay strongly about it. She had not dared set foot ashore, when Caius's boat docked there. She did not know what that evil was, or why it lingered. That made it all the more frightening. She turned the page quickly, reading on:

* * *

In the year 650 (104 years before Christ), the Teutons, now allied with the Vocontii, and with help from the league of the Salluvii, defeated Marius east of Aquae Sextiae Salluviorum, and put an end to Roman designs upon Gaul.

* * *

What had she just read? She looked back up the page. What tricks eyes and minds could play. Marius had defeated the Teutons in 104 B.C., securing Rome's hold on Provence. He had ordered a canal dug through the marshes of Camargue. She had travelled on that canal only the year before. She read the passage again:

* * *

In the year 650 (104 years before Christ), the Teutons, now allied with the Vocontii, and with help from the league of the Salluvii, defeated Marius east of Aquae Sextiae Salluviorum, and put an end to Roman designs upon Gaul.

She pulled the lamp closer. Was it a prank? No words had been erased or changed. The faulty paragraph was identical to the rest. Had the scribe written them wrong, in monkish rebellion against an overbearing taskmaster?

It was almost dawn. Picking up the lamp, she shuffled to the windowless back room for her clothing. A flash of whiteness caught her eye—a white feather. A hen's feather.

"Guihen," she breathed, scrutinizing the stone wall's regular courses for the slightest waver that might give the sprite away "Guihen! If you're here, appear now," she commanded. "I'm too tired for pranks." There was no flicker of motion, no cheery high-pitched chuckle. She spun the feather between finger and thumb.

How strange. That was how he had signalled her when she was little, before anyone was concerned that she had inherited her mother's gift, before anyone thought much about wood sprites.

She would have to delay her return to the relaxed cheeriness of Anselm's high fortress, and go instead to the old campsite in the hills, as she had done when she was a child.

* * *

The slope to the high forest was rough and steep, and she had not slept. If it was not one thing, it was another. If not the goddess, then Saracens, and now Guihen. What else would keep her from her studies? What else would thrust between her and her goal?

"Pierrette!" cried Diodoré, spurring his horse forward. There was her answer. She should not ask such questions. "You shouldn't go out alone. There are demons."

Pierrette wanted to flutter her eyelashes to say that, with a protector like him, she feared neither brigands nor supernatural manifestations. She sighed. "You're kind to be concerned, but I'm going to meet a shy old friend, to trade for herbs. If he sees you, he'll flee, and I'll return emptyhanded."

"Ah," said the young soldier knowingly—though indeed he knew little at all. "I'll take you as far as the edge of the high woods."

He would come crashing after her at the first shriek of an owl, waving his sword and terrifying poor Guihen. Despite her resolve to use spells only in dire circumstances, she would have to. A very small spell.

From a small leather pouch she withdrew a tiny bell, keeping it out of sight. Guihen had given it to her when she was little. It was shaped like a muguet, a white, sweet flower of the moist woods by the sacred pool. Under her breath, she murmured in an almost-forgotten tongue.

"What did you say?" asked Diodoré.

"I said I hear the church bell," she replied. "I wonder what's amiss?"

"I hear nothing."

"Listen." She moved the tiny flower-bell, and heard not a silvery tinkle close by, but a deep brazen peal at some distance.

"You're right," said Diodoré, frowning. "Perhaps the Moor has returned."

Pierrette jiggled the tiny bell vigorously, and the church bell's peal echoed from the hills surrounding Citharista, and richocheted outward over the ocean, multiplied tenfold. With an apologetic shrug, the knight rode off. Pierrette hurried to a faint trail that led steeply uphill. She hoped Diodoré would miss it entirely, when he found that no one had rung the church's bell, and no one but he had heard the ringing.

* * *

How old had she been when last she had sat by a campfire here? The scrub oaks pressed no more closely than when she had been five, the night her mother died. She laid dry sticks on the fire, and tried to distinguish the sounds of dry wood burning from the rustlings of small creatures. She would not hear Guihen. She would not see him until he wished it.

When she heard crackling and crashing, the thumping of footsteps, she leaped to her feet, her heart hammering.

The man who emerged was taller than a Frank, though his hair was brown. In the shadowy brush, two pairs of eyes gleamed greenly. "Yan Oors!" she gasped, which meant "John of the Bears."

"It is I, little witch," he boomed. "Our leafy friend will be here soon. He's too frightened to walk openly, but skulks from rock to tree." His shaggy companions remained outside the firelight's circle.

Though Pierrette knew Yan Oors meant her no harm, he was terrifying. He wore blackened chain mail and a leather vest darkened with oil and sweat. His muscular legs were a froth of black, curly hair. His black kilt and flapping leather pteruges were like those once worn by Roman soldiers. From a wide belt depended a sword like a Roman spatha, but half again as long. Its iron scabbard was slung from chains in the Celtic fashion out of style for more centuries than even Anselm the mage had lived.

Yan Oors leaned his wrist-thick staff against a sapling oak. It was brown as old wood, but Pierrette had once tried to pick it up: it was iron—a fallen star forged in Earth's fire and quenched in the Mother's blood.

"Have you ensorcelled yon poor knight?" he asked, using the Latin equite instead of the Frankish knicht, unpronounceable to a southern tongue. His grin revealed gapped, yellowed teeth, and crevasses spread across his weathered visage. "He's beaten up and down the trail until his poor horse is frothy."

"Poor Diodoré," Pierrette murmured. "He thinks he's in love with me."

"As are we all, girl," said a new voice, high and boyish. Leaves and branches coalesced into a figure whose hair was moonlight on bleached stone, a face at once old and young. His eyes picked cool blue hues from the fire. Moonlight colored his puffy white shirt, and his silky pantaloons were embroidered with willow and olive leaves that shifted from russet to emerald as he moved. "Perhaps you've ensorcelled all of us."

"Guihen!" Pierrette exclaimed.

The two odd men settled by the fire—Guihen far from Yan's staff; the smell of iron made him ill. Pierrette glimpsed something white cradled under his arm. "How is Penelope?"

The sprightly fellow snorted in mock disgust. He released his small, white hen to scratch in the stony soil. "Her name's not Penelope. She has never told me her name . . . unless it's `cluck.' "

"She is Penelope," Pierrette insisted. "She never told me she isn't."

"Bah!" replied Guihen.

Abruptly he became serious. "Terrible things are happening. I'm afraid." He recounted how the folk of the towns had rejected him and his kind—the small, ancient folk people called sprites, dryads, and elves (though most of them, like Pierrette's mother Elen, were as human as anyone). He told of banes hung in doorways, rumors of evil magic and changeling beast-children left in the beds of stolen babes.

For many human lifetimes Guihen and Yan Oors had languished in the vast Rhodanus delta, the Camargue, where ancient magics still worked. Pierrette had urged them out to play pranks and do kind deeds, recreating the climate of belief that had once sustained them. She thus felt a proprietary interest. "If you've been playing evil tricks, and not giving people any pleasant surprises, you have only yourselves to blame."

"It's not so," Guihen protested. Other forces were at work. Trees crept through the night like stalking hunters, rocks rolled uphill when no one was looking, and ancient graves folded back their mossy blankets, releasing the dead into the land of the living.

"It's true, little witch," agreed Yan Oors. "I've seen the graves—and bodies wearing iron casques or bronze helms, with no faces inside them."

"Are you sure?" Pierrette shuddered. His words evoked a vision long past, a Gaulish sanctuary where niches held the heads of dead heroes and enemies, reeking of cade oil and spices, iron spikes driven ear to ear: a dream of the very place the goddess Ma wished her to go—Ugium.

"They are fantômes," said Yan. "Ghosts of ancient Gauls."

"How can that be?" she asked.

"A body is ash and earth," Yan explained, "quickened by breath." The word "spiritos" could mean "ghost" as well as "breath."

"A fantôme," he said, "is desire and craving, hunger, lust, and anger—all things that promote survival. Without a fantôme, a heart would stop and flesh rot. Sometime after death, the fantôme departs."

"How can you know when it's gone?"

"Rot or cremation release it—but if someone preserves the head, the soul is trapped too, so the fantôme must linger. It will obey its captor, for a promise of eventual freedom."

"I don't understand," said Pierrette. "Christian beliefs have supplanted old Gaulish ones. No one has taken heads since before the fall of Rome. Where are these fantômes coming from?"

"Perhaps they are ancient, only now called to service."

"Could heads remain uncorrupted for a thousand years? Wouldn't they rot?"

"I believed so," rumbled Yan, "but fantômes march now."

"What do you expect me to do?"

"Find out why this is happening."

"Help us!" interjected Guihen. "Folk blame us for the ghosts' deeds."

Things got worse and worse. Uneasily, Pierrette recognized that Ma's demand and theirs were not unrelated, but she did not mention Ugium. "When I return to Anselm's keep, I'll look in his scrolls and books."

* * *

The rocks of the Eagle's Beak slanted upward and westward, overhanging the sea. Built of the same red marl as the scarps, the magus Anselm's keep blended with them. Only a columned portico stood out. Thinking the columns were Moorish, locals called it "the Saracen keep."

A narrow path wound across the scarp to the portico. Steep cliffs fell away on both sides. Pierrette watched her step: the rock was brittle and unstable. A misstep to either side would end in a tumble hundreds of feet to her death.

Safely between the columns at last, she breathed a sigh of relief. Taking a small bell from its niche, she summoned her master to open the weathered wood door. She heard the clatter of sandals within as he descended the stone staircase.

"Where have you been?" he demanded crankily.

Pierrette sighed. Inside the keep it was always day, the same bright day when the spell had first been spoken. A century might pass unnoticed. After a week of study inside, Pierrette could emerge on the causeway at the exact moment she had entered. Perversely, Anselm might never know she had gone, or might think she had abandoned him for a decade. She had never figured it out.

There were compensations. Time yielded to necessary tasks, and there were always hours to finish them. That was how Pierrette, only a girl, had mastered history, Greek, Latin, and especially geometry, from which she had figured out how magic worked—and why it sometimes did not.

"You must have been very busy," she said, "to think I was gone so long."

"I was reading ibn Saul's geography. If I am ever to venture to far lands—or to find my way home—I must know what to expect." Home was far away, in a place that no longer existed—in this world. But that is another tale. . . .

They ascended the long stairway, and emerged in the bright light of eternal noon. The air was always pleasantly cool on the rooftop of Anselm's keep.

"I wish historians and copyists were as reliable as your Arab friend," she said. "Do you remember who won the battle beneath Mount Sainte Victoire in the year 650 after Rome's founding?"

"Calvinus? No, it was Marius."

Pierrette explained what she had read—that Marius had lost that battle.

"Not so. Come. We'll check my copy of Diodorus." He unrolled a scroll on his library's long reading table, and found the passage in question:

* * *

In the year 650 the Teutons, allied with the Vocontii, were defeated by Marius east of Aquae Sextiae Salluviorum, and he was accorded a triumph in Rome.

* * *

"How strange," Pierrette mused. "Have you left this open in sunlight, master? See how it's faded?" The earliest writing on the scroll was clear and dark, but as she unrolled it past the passage they had examined, it became progressively fainter. At the end, the parchment was entirely blank.

"I have another copy, unopened since I acquired it."

"Good. I'll need your maps as well." She explained what Yan Oors had said about fantômes. She wished to identify ancient oppida, abandoned hill-cities of the ancient Gauls, to see if there was a correlation with ghostly apparitions and unnatural events.

"What of your other work?" he asked. Discovering that magic, like geometry, proceeded from stated postulates to logical conclusion, and that spells were in fact theorems, Pierrette had freed him from bondage on the cape. He could now enjoy the company of men in the wineshops in Citharista, or visit his friend Muhammad abd' Ullah ibn Saul in Massalia. His shadow did not disappear when he went too far.

Once sorcerers had whisked themselves wherever they willed, and did not depend on the belief of villagers to give them strength. Why had that changed? Pierrette was close to an answer. Of course Anselm was concerned.

"You're the only person who cares," she said angrily. "All I hear from anyone else is, `Fix this, fix that.' I'll solve this matter of Gaulish fantômes who refuse to remain gone and forgotten, and then . . ."

"And then there will be something else."

* * *

Pierrette laid translucent vellum over a Roman chart of the Narbonensis, from the Rhodanus to the Alps. She marked Gaulish citadels mentioned by ancient writers in red: Glanum, on the road from the Alps, Heraclea—now Ugium—and the citadel of Entremont, halfway between Alps and Pyrenees. Entremont had been Rome's first conquest in Gaul, the key to the coastal route to Iberia.

She had two lists of ghostly appearances and unnatural events. One was Father Otho's, copied from the letter he was writing to his bishop. The other was her own—the occurrences Yan Oors and Guihen had described, and others her father had heard in the wine shop. She marked each apparition on her map with a tiny Arabic number.

A pattern emerged: preternatural appearances had occurred near almost every Celtic oppidum. Other concentrations must represent old urban or sacred sites lost to historic memory. The two largest clusterings were around Entremont, close to Aquae Sextiae, and near . . . Ugium.

Pierrette's eyelids drooped and the tracing blurred. She shuffled to her room, where heavy drapes blocked the noonday sunlight. She slept. Later, when hunger drove her, she climbed the stone stairs to the high patio and supped on olives, bread, cheese, and figs, washing them down with watered wine.

"I've searched everywhere for accounts of the old religions, master."

"How strange. My library is complete. What, specifically, do you need?"

"The fantômes are Gaulish ghosts, but the only descriptions of the Gaulish religion are Caesar's. Where are the druids' holy books?"

"Ah, child. Druids' apprenticeship lasted nineteen years. Six thousand, seven hundred and ninety-seven days, actually—a Golden Year. That often, sun- and moon-years exactly coincide."

"Did you hear my question, master?"

"Yes, I did. Now, the thirteen lunar months encompass 364 days, but the solar year is 365 and one fourth. That's why Caesar adopted Eudoxius's idea of a `leap year.' It was more straightforward than the Gauls' system, though less accurate."

"That's very interesting. But I need to know the postulates of their religion, the irreducible concepts. These ghosts mean that druidic axioms have been incorporated into the magic—the theology—of this time."

Religions were rational edifices constructed upon premises—and magic followed the same rules. A change in premise, in a basic belief, affected the structure above it, just as the replacement of a foundation stone with something else affected a building—for better or worse.

A spell had only one outcome in ancient times, but if its essential postulates had changed, it might have a different outcome today. That was why Pierrette dared essay only simple spells, ones she had examined carefully and tested with great caution.

Anselm sighed. "You won't like what you find."

"Why is that?"

"The dryadeae required nineteen years to memorize their sacred texts. They were never written down."

"Then how can I learn them?"

"Isn't it obvious? You must speak with a druid who has completed his Golden Year."

"The last druids are seven centuries in their graves, or are fantômes. I can't speak with them in either case."

"You can. You will, if you must."

"Mondradd in Mon," she murmured.

Those were the first words of a spell. Once, they had flung her willy-nilly to the end of time, when great, dead machines loomed over Citharista, and the beeches of the sacred grove were only craggy stumps.

"I don't dare." When she had used that spell, she had sensed the tenuous thread that traced down through the centuries, from the Pierrette who lay in deathlike repose by the sacred pool to herself. The thread had been thin, tangled by the seasonal turns of the stars, the spinning of the Earth.

That the world spun about the sun was obvious from the spiralling thread that linked body and faraway consciousness. Her mind recoiled from the ponderous movements of worlds, the fragility of that thread.

"I can't," she said. "I'm afraid."

Anselm raised his hands, palms up. "Is there any other way?"

Pierrette had no answer.

 

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