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Chapter 7 - The Road to Hell

"Who are you?" demanded a male voice. "What are you doing here? Where's the priestess?"

Pierrette sat up, experiencing a sense of déjà vu. Someone was silhouetted against the streaming daylight. Cerdos? Had she just awakened on the far side of the valley from the hostel? Had everything since been madness or an improbable dream? But it was not Cerdos's jovial booming voice, and the question he asked was different. She squinted.

"I . . . I was asleep."

"I can see that," said the sharp-tongued newcomer. He spoke Greek, and she had responded in that tongue. Now she could see him better. He wore a dirty-white, pleated kilt, and had knobby knees. Over his shoulder was a sagus, a blue-and-yellow Gaulish greatcloak.

Where was Doreta? Her pallet was still warm. "I am . . . Petra." That meant much the same as "pierrette," which was "little stone," or "pebble."

"Oh—you're a girl, despite those trousers."

"Would you want to hike these hills in a long dress?"

"I suppose not." He looked around, seeing nothing but a rather ordinary cave. "I hope I've come to the right place. Is this Lugh's sanctuary?"

Pierrette thought of Ferdiad's song. "Among other things, yes."

"Then I must ask his blessing on these." He held a leather cylinder that might contain a scroll.

"What is it?"

"Drawings and plans of the great walls I have built for Heraclea. The town's elders require changes, and I must have the god's approval first."

"Heraclea? You mean . . . Ugium?"

"Oogey-yum? What's that? It sounds ugly."

"It is. Never mind. Are you an architect?" Once Gaulish Vindonnum, Greek Heraclea would not become Roman Ugium for centuries, Pierrette recalled.

"Not exactly. I build walls, not bridges, and who puts fine arches in defensive works?"

Again she had confused terms. Arch-builder. "Architect" was more specifically defined in this age. Later it would mean any builder at all.

Doreta, who had washed her face in the pool, came forward. "I will show you where to leave your gift for Lugh," she said with a confidence Pierrette had not seen before. "Come." She led him back into the cave.

Pierrette poked about, and found a basket of bread, cheese, and pears, the gift of some recent pilgrim.

The Greek emerged without his leather package. Lugh's rite must have been short and simple. "That looks good," he said, eying the bread and cheese. Pierrette's mouth was full, so she merely gestured him to sit.

Even with his own mouth full, the busy fellow was a talker. He was Enakles, a student of a student of Ictinos, who had designed the acropolis in Athinai. The Massiliotes, he explained, also Greeks, wished to monopolize the trade with the inland Gauls, and the Heracleans feared war. They had hired him to replace Gaulish stone-and-timber walls with modern stone ones with projecting bastions. The Massiliotes would not make war if their spies found his walls too formidible.

"Are there still Gauls in Heraclea?" she asked.

"Of course there are. Only a quarter of the population is Greek, though it's beginning to look like a real polis."

"Are there druidae?"

"What? Dryadeae, you mean?" He used the Greek pronounciation. "Hah! Whose idea do you think it was that I come here? There's a temple to Herakles Wall-builder in the town. Why do you think it's called `Heraclea,' anyway? He was the first Greek to visit the place. Not that I don't appreciate Lugh's blessing, mind you, but it took me three weeks to get here, and the trip back will be little easier."

"I wish to go with you."

"You do? Well, that's your business. I suppose I can lend you a horse. You're light enough you won't need a remount. Other than that, you'll have to pay your own way."

Pierrette had no money. How could she pay?

Doreta again emerged from the darkness, and blew out her lamp. "Your walls have my husband's blessing," she said. "Do you have mine?" It was not Doreta, Pierrette decided. That was truly Belisama, daughter of Bel and Ma. The girl was learning fast. She had a good teacher, too.

"This seeress has business with the dryadeae of Heraclea—my business. She needs only one single coin to pay her way." Belisama held out her hand, and a tarnished coin. When Enakles had seen it, she offered it to Pierrette. "This is for the boatman, when you cross the great river."

"Is she going to die?" blurted Enakles.

Belisama silenced him with a stern look. "Will you live forever, architect? When your time comes, will you have a coin for Charon in your teeth?"

He paled, and glanced uneasily at Pierrette. Charon was the boatman who ferried the souls of dead Greeks across the River Styx to their underworld.

Pierrette took the coin. She rubbed it on her coarse tunic to remove a bit of the tarnish. Its highlights now delineated an ancient face. Their pure, colorless shine suggested the coin was silver. She tied it in the hem of her boy's tunic. "Thank you, Mother," she said. What had Ma shown Doreta? That Pierrette was going to die? She compressed her lips. She would not ask.

* * *

Doreta sent Enakles outside the cave. "A famous seeress must not arrive wearing a boy's baggy pants," she said. "Come. Let's get you dressed properly." She helped Pierrette don a lovely sky blue dress not unlike her own. Doreta instructed her how to drape her white woolen mantle just over her left shoulder, so the two gold fibulae that secured it, connected by a fine-wrought chain, would show. When Pierrette admired the fibulae from the side, they were rampant stags with coral antlers. Like all Celtic art, when she viewed them from a different angle, they were something else—in this case, gnomish faces with inlaid coral hair. Their shifting, curvilinear design was difficult to focus on—much, she reflected, as time and reality had become. She presented Pierrette with a tan leather belt set with round gold phalerae and a little sack of uncut gems.

Doreta's last gift was a single large bead on a cotton cord, translucent white glass veined with red and blue, patterns like twisted, fraying cords that went into the depths of the orb, not painted on its surface, a masterwork of the Celtic glassblower's art. "It's called a `serpent's egg,' " she said. "Keep it concealed under your cloak, and reveal it only at the necessary moment."

"When will that be?"

"Right now, if you're in such a hurry," Doreta snapped.

"I'm sorry," Pierrette replied contritely.

"There are things you must know," said Doreta. (When she spoke authoritatively like that, Pierrette could not help but think of her as Belisama.) "Your name will be Petra. Petra Veleda, guatatros—a speaker for the goddess Veleda. You are a seeress yourself, but you don't know very much about us Gauls. The dhru-vedi will not accept you as their equal unless . . ."

Enakles was not summoned back into the cave for many hours thereafter, while Pierrette heard what she needed to know, and while she packed a variety of herbs, dried mushrooms, and powders, each in a tiny, folded square of parchment. She wrapped them all together in cloth, and secured them in a leather pouch.

Before departing with Enakles, she changed back into her boy's clothes. "It's safer being a boy," she said. "Besides, I've been one longer than I have a girl, and much longer than a woman."

She gave one last glance at the enigmatic fibulae before wrapping them in a scrap of cloth. Time and reality, she reflected. She did not even know what year it was. She was sure she remembered that Heraclea's walls had been built late in the second century B.C., only a short while before Massalia had allied with the Romans for the conquest of Provence. She would have to find out.

* * ** * *

Enakles had not come to the cave by the pilgrims' route. "We must climb higher, and descend on the south side. My horses and servant will be waiting at the head of the trail."

From the summit she could see everything merely by turning in a circle. There, due north, was the long line of Mount Sainte Victoire, glimmering gold in the sunshine. Directly below was a cluster of huts, a village, on the site where Cerdos might—or might not—lay his foundations. West of it were hills gray with distance; on one stood Entremont. Further west, at the limit of vision, water gleamed—the great lagoon she had sailed in Caius's salt-boat. Heraclea was somewhere on the far side, invisible below the horizon.

She turned southward. The sea stretched across her entire field of vision. There was the Saracen's Hat, a distinctive crag like an overturned jar or a turban. There, on that deep, shiny bay was—would be—Citharista, encircled in the protecting arm of Eagle Cape. Anselm's keep would someday be there, just around the corner of those high cliffs, too small to be seen at this distance.

The world was immense, and she had seen so little of it. From this barren mountain scarp she could encompass, in a single glance, lands beyond anywhere her feet had trod. And the entire vista was only the tiniest patch on a world that went on, perhaps forever.

* * *

Enakles's servant was a taciturn Illyrian Greek who (when he spoke at all) had an impenetrable accent. There were six horses, and a Gaulish one-horse cart with ash springs and iron-tied wheels. Enakles was indeed wealthy and important. They would ride in style, with remounts for the two men.

On the long eastward ride, she quizzed Enakles, and ascertained that the year was 620 from the founding of Rome, or 134 B.C. The siege of Entremont was almost a decade away, and Marius's decisive battle twenty-odd years beyond that. The brilliant sunshine seemed to brighten even more. The shifting breezes brought the salty tang of the sea to her nostrils with one breath, the scent of rosemary crushed beneath horses' hooves the next, and the rich aroma of sun-heated pines moments later. It was a wonderful . . . time . . . to be alive.

Pierette resolutely refused to think that there might be another Pierrette, lying cold on a rainy hillside, connected to her by a thread so tenuous she could not feel it at all. She felt real, and alive. She was. She had to believe that, or go mad.

* * *

The road was smoother than even the best-preserved Roman ones Pierrette had seen. She abruptly realized that the legions had not found Gaul a tabula rasa, and written their viae and iterae upon it.

"Gauls have always built the best roads," said Enakles. "Do you think Hannibal crossed the whole of Gaul, elephants and all, on goat tracks? Even much of the route through the Alps was graded, if not all paved with stone."

Eighty years hence—in the history Pierrette remembered—Julius Caesar would use those roads to move his troops with lightning speed. Ironically, had the Gauls been the savages Roman writers portrayed, and had Caesar needed to hack his way through dense forest, to wade bottomless swamps, he could never have conquered Provence.

The travelling party slept at well-maintained inns at crossroads where there was a spring or a dug well. Many had names like Lunemeton or Vindonemeton, "Lugh's sanctuary," or Belenemeton, "Bel's shrine," and were run by devotees of Vindonnos (Lugh), Belinos, or Sequana. Gods and goddesses existed in dazzling numbers. There were, according to a blacksmith who repaired their cart's worn iron tire, thirty-three deities. His own tutelary god was Sukellos, a hammer-wielder like himself.

Yet Pierrette counted a hundred names, and she began to think that as a "priestess" of Veleda, who had been a seeress, she might not make much impact among the intellectual caste of Heraclea. If every smith was priest by virtue of his practice of Sukellos's art, every milkmaid an avatar of Damona, a cow-goddess, and if every woman named Brigitte was a gutuatra who spoke with and for the tribal goddess Brigantu, then was she, a druidess, a dryade, devoted to Veleda, only one more tradeswoman, whose particular art was . . . inference?

She would need every bit of aid Belisama had given her to impress the dryadeae. They must speak freely with her, so she could find out what she needed to know. She made a mental note to say "dryade," not "druid." Only centuries hence, when Romans and Christians forced Celtic scholars and holy men into the secrecy of the forests would a "dryad," persecuted and exiled, become a forest spirit. Words—postulates—changed, and reality with them.

The smith consulted with a carpenter (when an iron tyre needed to be removed, it only made sense to replace a worn nave, a cracked spoke, or a rotted felloe at the same time). The woodwright's god was Esus. Was it a coincidence that the Nazarene Jesus—Esus, given the almost-silent nature of the Roman "J"—would also be a carpenter? For the Celtic lands to become the stronghold of Christianity that she remembered, there was no room for accident.

* * *

Their route led almost straight west for several days. "Massilia is ahead," Enakles stated one afternoon. "It would not do for me to be recognized, so we'll turn north in the morning."

"Will we cross the . . ." She did not know what the Estaque range was called, now. " . . . the ridges between the sea and the great lagoon?"

"I thought to skirt them. There's a goat path over their west end. We'll have to abandon the wagon, but it's the dryadeaes' money paid for it, and they want me back safely. If soldiers from Massilia were to catch me . . ." He shrugged. She could imagine what pressures the Massiliotes would bring to bear on the architect of their rival's walls.

Her question about the hills had not been idle. The last time she had crossed the Estaque, her fire-spell had changed. In Massilia—the post-Roman Massalia of her day—it had given forth only clear sunlike light: Christian light, she called it. She reminded herself to call it Massilia, because it would not be Roman for centuries—if at all. Beyond the Estaque, it had produced a sickly, oppressive red glow. Only past the River Rhodanus's main channel, in the Camargue, had it again made fire.

In the morning, as Enakles made ready to depart, Pierrette slipped away and, behind the windowless rear wall of the inn, essayed her small spell. She was rewarded with a very ordinary little flame that consumed the dry olive twig in her fingers. They were as near Massilia as when the spell had changed, in her own era, which confirmed that the city's future Christian aura, not geography alone, had effected the change: Massilia would not become Christian for centuries.

There were no inns on Enakles's chosen route, only cleared places flat enough to camp. The road degenerated. When it divided into two narrow paths, Enakles sold his cart to a traveller coming down from the hills. They packed most of their necessities on the horses. Without remounts, they would have to rest more often, but they would anyway—it was a long, steep climb.

Descending the far side the following day, Pierrette verified that the spell was unchanged. In this age, the environs of the future Ugium (only a few miles to the north) were like any other place. That was reassuring. Perhaps it would not be as bad now as it had been, in her vision.

That afternoon, when they stopped to rest the horses, Pierrette slipped into her dress. It was too warm for the mantle, so she draped it over her horse, behind her. She tied wide-strapped Gaulish sandals on her feet, and after tying her gauzy veil in place, pulled it down around her neck. She would wear it if they encountered anyone.

She was glad that her horse was small. Encumbered as she was with clumsy footgear and yards of cloth, she had to ask Enakles's help to mount.

 

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